


Stops on the Way to the End of the World

by FernWithy



Series: End of the World [10]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-04-03 21:38:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4115800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernWithy/pseuds/FernWithy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One shot stories taking place during the various stories in the "End of the World" series. (To be posted together rather than separately, since that makes more sense than a billion separate ones.) 1. November - Rebel victors; 2. The Only Sane Woman - Fulvia/Plutarch; 3. For the Love of the Games (early Snow); 4. Snowmelt (Peeta in the Capitol)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. November

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the events of Chapter 26 of "These Are the Names," Haymitch meets with other rebels to discuss the disastrous alliance with the out-district raiders.

** The year after the 70th Hunger Games. **

November in Appalachia can be depressing.  
  
Not that District Twelve is exactly brimming with warmth in June, of course, but it _looks_ good then. The mountains are green, the sky is blue, and there's a kind of softness in the air. The town square is full of leafy shadows, and the smells from the bakery and the pub and the inn float out their open windows. Even the Seam isn't too dreary in June. The scents of the woods drift in over the fence, and there's a kind of rich undertone to it, the smell of earth getting sunlight and rain as life grows up through it. In June, if you can ignore the poverty and the fact the reaping is around the corner -- not that I've been able to do that for a while -- the place is pretty tolerable.  
  
In November, all of that is gone. The leaves have fallen from the trees, leaving them poking up like gray finger bones. The sky is almost always cloudy, and in the dim light, the evergreens are black arrows aimed aggressively at the heavens. There's nothing to counter the infiltration of the coal dust, which leaves everything a kind of dull, grayed out wasteland. _Even red is gray here_ , Digger once told me.  
  
There's a lot I've forgotten about Digger after all these years, but not that. I have a feeling she must say it in dreams that I don't remember in the morning.  
  
The worst part about November is that it's all just settling in. By the time March rolls around, you've forgotten June, and the gray world is all there is. But in November, you can still close your eyes and smell the green world, and opening them onto the new reality -- knowing that you're not going to see much else for months -- makes it even worse.  
  
Snow missed a trick by putting the Games in the summer. I'm sure he thought it was about spoiling the best time of the year, but the truth is, if he'd put them in November, when the lights are slowly going out on the world, people would be so bored and miserable that they might actually give in and enjoy the obscenity, because the Games, at least, would be a break in the gray.  
  
Maybe not this year, not in Twelve.  
  
Not with the smoke still rising from the mines, and men and women still missing, ripped from their families, never to be seen again, or even buried. They were vaporized down there. No one has said it. No one needs to. They finally determined that it was a coal dust explosion, and we know what a coal dust explosion does. We all took mine safety in school.  
  
I've done what I can, but between Capitol laws about charity and District Twelve's orneriness on the subject, it's not a hell of a lot. An addition on the Community Home for the new orphans (money carefully given on the sly to builders, who could sneak in a little donated labor), slipping a little more money into the hands of the mine supervisor, who could use it to quietly slip into the pay when profits went down over the low yield. The miners still took a hit, which they expected, and complain about, but between me and the supervisor, we were able give them sixty-eight percent of their normal earnings instead of fifty-two percent. They don't know about it, of course. They'd refuse it out of shame if they did.  
  
Of course, I had to stop before the Capitol noticed the funds disappearing from my account and started auditing, but I could maybe do a little more than in another year. The supervisor isn't the only Capitol liaison who's decided he's in it with us. The bankers have been doing their best to cover up oddities as well. No one talks about this, and there's only so far we can push before the Capitol gets suspicious enough to send in new people, but maybe we've managed to help a little bit, at least on the financial angle.  
  
The broken families, the grieving widows, the bewildered orphans… there's nothing we can help with there.  
  
All of it was exactly the least _I_ could do, after our own people -- or at least people we'd allied with -- attacked the relief train, then tried to kill the tributes on the train in June. The damned out-district raiders. It was like making an alliance with a diseased rats to fight a pit of rattlesnakes.  
  
The Peacekeepers aren't patrolling the perimeter fence, because the raiders haven't made it up this far, and Snow can't afford enough of them to keep the population at bay _and_ protect them, and no one wonders which of those things is priority. I know they're engaged outside of Eleven, and that there's fierce fighting inside the boundaries of Nine and Seven, but up here, we see none of it. The listless people wandering in the streets have barely noticed news of faraway battles, and they've certainly made no connection between Snow's crackdown on the raiders and the fact that the relief train never arrived, largely because no one has ever told them that relief was on the way.  
  
Hell, they'd have probably turned it over and refused to take Capitol charity, anyway.  
  
At least Effie didn't need to see _that_.  
  
I close my eyes.  
  
Effie.  
  
I can't think too much about the subject. Caesar Flickerman says that she's not being hurt, but I know what they do. I know about the re-education. And they won't let me talk to her. The only time they did, she seemed… tired. Distant. And I saw her on television not long ago, dancing with the other escorts, looking blank-eyed and empty behind her smile.  
  
Effie is gone. Maybe it's better for her. Maybe she won't think about what the raiders threatened her with on the train. Maybe she won't put together that they were acting, at least tangentially, on behalf of the rebellion.  
  
Which means on _my_ behalf, no matter what I told her.  
  
Oh, I didn't give them any orders, and I fought side by side with Snow's Peacekeepers to get them off the tribute train, but I know who they were, and I know why they were there, and I know exactly who brought them in and when.  
  
I even know who still wants them there.  
  
At any rate, the Peacekeepers aren't patrolling the perimeter -- which is probably good for the illegal hunters I'm sure are still out there -- but a few of the people in town have taken to doing it. Merle Undersee is the mayor and has access to a cart, which he takes out at least once a day on the pretense of "checking up" on people. Sammel Cooley takes the long way around after a long day at the mines. An old woman named Tessa Pratt, who worked with my mother years ago, broke her foot and is now among the unemployed, and I know she keeps track of the length of fence near her squat, and Sae, who used to run the Community Home and now make her business in the Hob, walks the fence at night with her butcher knife in her hand. Danny has started delivering baked goods around town as a cover for keeping an eye out for raiders. (Mir, of course, thinks he's having an affair, particularly since Ruth's husband, Glen Everdeen, was among the dead in the mine explosion.)  
  
I patrol, of course. Maybe I do it more than the others, since I have nothing but time on my hands. I've taken the side of the town near the track. I owe it. I hope every other rebel victor is doing the same. It's a habit now: Every few days, I get out of the house just as the gray, grimy sunset starts to come in, then wander along the fence. I have a bottle with me and it's not for show -- by the time I get back, I'm usually starting to get pleasantly numb -- but I don't start out drunk, and even by full dark, I'm only partway there. I carry an arena knife in my pocket, and I look out through the fence, into the shadows in the woods, listening for raiders, watching for movements.  
  
I kind of hope they come. I feel like, if they dare to cross the District Twelve fence, and I can look them in the eye and tell them that they don't speak for the rebellion -- before or after I kill them; I'm not picky on the subject -- that somehow, I'll be clean of what happened.  
  
Tonight should at least start out looking like the other nights. The Peacekeepers have gotten used to my comings and goings over the last few months, along with the others. Like the relief work for the mines, they've tacitly tolerated what I'm sure they know is going on. There aren't enough of them to do it, but if no one puts up an alarm, they'll be on the front lines of the fighting, and they know it. Better to let us keep our watches. At first, they jostled me and made jokes about me losing the way to Victors' Village, but now, they're used to seeing me. A new kid named Darius even waves to me as I pass.  
  
This could be a problem getting back -- it's possible that they'll notice when I don't head home, or that I'm not there tomorrow -- but Finnick has some kind of plan to get me back more quickly than usual, according to the note a furtive District Six rebel passed me last week. I'm a little nervous about what it might be.  
  
The supply train is being unloaded. It's mostly supplies for the merchants' shops, along with the tessera grain and oil, and other Capitol-approved products. The last time I made one of these trips, in March, I came back disguised as a load of peaches for Danny. He just pried me out of the crate, and I pretended that I'd come along with him in the first place so I could help him get it home.  
  
This time, I've opted to leave Danny out of it. He and Mirrem had full blow-out of a fight last time. She didn't suspect what he was really doing (unless she thinks I'm the one he's having an affair with, I guess), but she's watching him like a hawk. Apparently, she let her temper slip with their youngest boy, Peeta, and Danny had the temerity to call her on it, so she blamed it on him, and all the secrets he's allegedly keeping from her -- basically that his supposed infidelity is driving her so crazy that she "accidentally" lashed out at Peeta. Danny's not buying it (for once), but she's playing the card for all it's worth, and making a great show of spying on him every time he leaves the bakery. Since she's not the sort to let an opportunity to get me in trouble slip by, I guess I’m on my own on this end until she calms down.  
  
I wait in the shadows by the fence, taking a few swigs of white liquor to keep warm. My feet are half sunk in bitterly cold mud. I'm glad of my Capitol-made shoes. I remember this kind of weather when I was in broken hand-me-downs.  
  
Finally, the last of the hired delivery men move a dolly out, with crates full of something I can't identify from here. A wispy District Six boy -- possibly another cousin of Berenice's, but I don't know for sure -- looks nervously around, then stretches ostentatiously, reaching his left arm out to point to one of the freight cars. I wait until he's gone, then cork my bottle and make the run. I dive into the shadows and see a rickety looking bench seat. There's a feather carved onto it. I poke my fingers into the grating, and it comes up smoothly on a hinge. I slide underneath.  
  
There's no question of drinking in this position, and, though I brought a brainless paperback to keep me company, reading is uncomfortable. I get a little way through the mystery (far enough to narrow the murder suspects down to a surgeon, a shady ex-Peacekeeper, an art dealer, and the Gamemakers), but for the most part, I spend the next six hours crouched uncomfortably, first watching them load crates of coal oil, then watching nothing at all as the train hurtles toward the fueling station on the way to District Eleven.  
  
When it finally stops, I have a headache and my legs are cramped, but I'm used to this. I've made the trip a few times. I ignore the pain and pull myself out, tottering a little as I stand up. Twenty-odd years of getting around drunk have taught me valuable lessons about moving when my body doesn't want to cooperate.  
  
I manage not to crash into the wall or any of the crates. Getting out is the dangerous part. There are no windows in a freight car, and they're not going to open doors for unloading out here. This is strictly a maintenance station, manned by District Six techs who must have really annoyed someone to pull this duty.  
  
I nudge the door open just a crack. If they're out there with guns, this is where I'll get shot. But there's no gunfire. I peer out onto the bright platform. Techs are swarming around the engine, feeding fuel lines in, but that's as close as anyone is. Probably there are people inside the train, but out here, they have no reason to be monitoring. I don't know why this station is _here_ exactly. I've wondered if it's really the furthest southern extent of the mines, and they're pulling processed coal from some conveyor down there. I guess I'd know if I actually worked in the mines. Mom and Dad never mentioned it, though. Maybe it's the site of some old ruin that would make sense of it.  
  
At any rate, there's nothing around for miles, and once I'm clear of the actual station, there won't be any patrols, unless the damned raiders have been moving north.  
  
I open the door further, lower myself down to the track, and then close it. There are Peacekeepers stationed at the various floodlights, but they're always young kids out here, ones who barely have any experience under their belts. They're already spooked by the wide open spaces, and have probably been reprimanded for discharging their weapons at random sounds in the woods. They don't see me as I slip into the shadows.  
  
I have to be careful on the cinder-lined incline that goes to the track. A spill of rocks would be a dead giveaway even to them. But my luck holds. There's a little snow, but it's in random patches, easy to avoid.  
  
I've barely walked for five minutes when I hear a brief rustle of branches above me. Johanna Mason drops from a low branch and grins, her teeth catching the pale moonlight. "Jeez, Abernathy," she whispers. "Glad we're not trying to keep secrets or anything. I think there's a spare twig about twenty yards back that you missed, if you want to make sure you get them all."  
  
I make a rude gesture at her. "It was a clean getaway."  
  
She shrugs. "Come on. Everyone's here."  
  
She leads the way easily through the woods, though these must be very different from the one's she's used to out west. She might as well be playing to the arena cameras -- she's certainly wearing the persona she made for herself there. She never seems to drop it.  
  
She's sixteen. I guess playing roles is part of the age, anyway.  
  
As we get further from the train, she lets her voice get a bit louder, telling me about a boy she's been toying with in District Seven, another one she met in the Capitol, and some designer's spring line, which she can't wait to try on. "Speaking of clothes," she segues awkwardly, "any word about Effie?"  
  
"No word."  
  
"She's nice."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Why would they do that to their own people? Send them off like that, I mean. Re-educate them. She's not a rebel… is she?"  
  
"No, she's not."  
  
"Is she your girlfriend?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Well, you were kind of hanging off her when we were sightseeing. Finnick says you're madly in love with her and won't admit it."  
  
"But you think you'll get me to crack under your interrogation?"  
  
"That's the idea." She grins. "I can be very annoying. Talk, or I'll start telling you about Persephone Sanderson's pre-fall line."  
  
"Anything but that," I say.  
  
"So?"  
  
"So, what?"  
  
"So, are you in love with Effie Trinket?"  
  
I want to go along with the playacting -- to go back to my usual joke about "saving myself" for Effie -- but I can't. It's still too fresh in my head. The call from Caesar saying that Effie had been taken to the hospital for exhaustion after an "overdose" in her apartment. Plutarch looking at me like we were at a funeral and saying, "It's Capitol Dreams, Haymitch. They've got her." The cold voice on the other end of the phone -- Mimi Meadowbrook's brother, Pertinax: "I'm taking care of her now. I know what I'm doing. I've cleaned up after you before."  
  
I don't say anything.  
  
Johanna doesn't mean any harm, and she gives up when she notices me squirming, going back to her monologue about her own love life, though "love" seems a pretty grand word for what she's describing. She seems pretty proud of herself for being so "grown-up."  
  
The land drops down into a bowl, not great for escaping, but pretty good for hiding the little tent-village they've built. It's all covered in pine branches and I imagine it's pretty invisible from the air, but it's clear enough at this level. Beetee is sitting in front of a square of metal that I assume is some kind of heater, as he's warming his hands over it. He stands up and signals back toward a tent.  
  
It looks like the rebel districts have only sent one victor each (not that this is ever a factor in Twelve). Finnick is here from Four, and Berenice from Six. Obviously, Johanna has made the trek from Seven. Cecelia is here from Eight, though she shouldn't be -- I don't know much about pregnancy, but I think she looks ready to pop. Seeder emerges from a tent across the clearing and gives me a friendly wave.  
  
Of course there's no one from One or Two. I don't know about Five -- they have no love for the Capitol, but their victors aren't exactly friendly with us.  
  
"No one from Ten?" I ask, hoping that someone's been able to make contact. I'm sure that they're rebels, but they always get knocked out of the Games early, and they tend to go home right away.  
  
Seeder shakes her head. "Not yet."  
  
"And Nine has enough troubles," Berenice says. She's a few days past from her last hit, I guess, and she's picking at her clothes, but she's relatively coherent. "Their victors aren't very nice, but there are other rebels. They're fighting with the raiders."  
  
"Never thought the rebellion and the Peacekeepers would be fighting with the same people," Finnick mutters.  
  
"No," Berenice says. "They're fighting _with_ the raiders. Together with them."  
  
I grind my teeth and try not to think of them leaning over Effie and threatening to take "nice, long turns" with her. "Really?"  
  
"Yeah. The raiders go through there a lot. They're sort of… local heroes?" She shrugs. "That's what they think, anyway. So when the Capitol came to start wiping them out, the locals in Nine started going raider. They raided Victors' Village."  
  
I let this one sink in, though Berenice seems to have already forgotten it, and is digging at a scar on her inner arm. They raided the Village in Nine. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a great political target. They're just out to destroy anything they think of as Capitol. That doesn't bode well.  
  
"So this is all of us," I say.  
  
It is. We talk a little bit about the inconveniences of travel in Panem -- most of them are returning on a fuel train tomorrow morning, staffed only by an ally of Berenice's, to District Eleven, and from there to the Rotation -- and what everyone's cover stories are. Seeder's cousin, who looks something like her ("It's convenient that the Capitol thinks we all look alike," she quips bitterly), is driving her truck around and wearing her clothes, giving dance lessons. Where the cousin is supposed to be, I'm not sure. Beetee has timed and motion-activated voice routines in his house and the lab, and the bugs should be picking up whatever he and Wiress are supposedly talking about. Cecelia has set up something similar, though it's Woof's wife doing the talking for her. Her husband is not happy about the trip. Berenice is off on a nod so often that no one ever notices when she's actually gone except for her dealers. Finnick supposedly is taking Mags and Annie on a boat cruise around the Ghost Gulf. Mags is handling it alone.  
  
"How _is_ Annie?" I ask.  
  
He smiles. "Better. You'll see on her Victory Tour. We go for a lot of walks. She's getting her head on straighter. She's making nets again. And… well, it could be that I have some other indications that she can recover."  
  
"Ew," Johanna says. "Seriously, Finnick? She's half nuts."  
  
He doesn't join her jest or make one of his self-deprecating jokes. He just says, "Jo, lay off. Now."  
  
She rolls her eyes hugely, but doesn't push it. "I don't need an excuse to be gone. Most of the time, we have to check in with the Peacemakers if we want anyone to know we're alive. Remember Edith!" She makes a mocking ghost-wail and flutters her arms theatrically at the mention of the first victor, who died over the winter in District Seven's Village and wasn't found until spring.  
  
"Speaking of District Seven…" Beetee starts.  
  
Jo grimaces. "Jack and Linden are keeping an eye on Blight. Making sure he doesn't decide to make any more new friends until we all agree."  
  
"Which brings us to the point," Cecelia says. "We left off our talk in the Capitol."  
  
_Talk_ is a generous word for what we were doing in the Capitol on the day that Effie came and found us to warn us that the Peacekeepers were coming. Johanna was defending Blight (she pretends to despise him, but we all know better), and Chaff and Beetee were unsuccessfully trying to get her to see how damaging it was. Chaff was starting to lose his temper at her. Seeder and Finnick were trying to get Wiress calmed down enough to help figure out how to eradicate any links to the rebellion that the Capitol might find. I was trying to figure out how the rebellion had spun completely out of our control, not to mention deciding exactly how much I wanted to make Blight pay for what had happened on the train. Mags was desperately trying to remind me that Blight was a friend, that we couldn't split the victors like that. I thought we were about to explode, and the end of the rebellion would happen there at the lake, as soon as people noticed a crowd of victors screaming at each other.  
  
Instead, Effie showed up, and within moments, we were working together. Granted, we were working to save our own skins, but everything has to start somewhere.  
  
I look at Johanna. "Are you still thinking it was a good idea?"  
  
"It _would_ have been if they weren't… you know."  
  
"Murderers?" Finnick finishes.  
  
"Like we _aren't_?" Jo asks, sensibly enough,  
  
"I never threatened to stick a victor's head on a pike and put it on the front of a train."  
  
Jo blinks solemnly. "They said that?"  
  
"Yeah. It probably would have been my head, since they thought I was a Capitol toy. At least until I speared one of them with his own bayonet."  
  
Cecelia holds up her hands. "Look, I know Blight didn't know what they were like…"  
  
"They take things," Berenice contributes. "They took Paulin's morphling. He had to use mine."  
  
"Maybe that's an argument in their favor," Seeder mutters beside me.  
  
"…but we brought them in without doing any research," Cecelia finishes. "I bet Blight thought they were like the ridiculous movies."  
  
"And we do need help," Seeder says. "If we could get into an arena with Snow and his cronies, we could wipe them out, but that's not likely to happen. We need to take on Peacekeepers. The full military. And I'm sorry, but the fact that we've got about fifty good knife fighters and spearmen isn't going to do any good against an army with tanks."  
  
"You're not seriously suggesting that we stick with the raiders?" I ask.  
  
"No. But…" She sighs. "Haymitch, we can't do this without doing _any_ damage."  
  
"We just have to get them damaging the right _stuff_ ," Jo puts in. "Burn the Capitol to the ground, for all I care, like they did to Thirteen."  
  
I doubt she's thought this position through. I know she's fond of Effie, and would certainly mourn the clothes, if not the people, in the fashion district. But she's sixteen. Everything's an absolute.  
  
"The Capitol is more than a third of the population of Panem, all told," Beetee says. "And that population isn't all that large to start with. In the last census, they estimated about one-point-one million in the Capitol, in a total of just under three million in the country. Destroying the Capitol, and taking into account the likely high casualties in the Districts in the course of a war, we could easily find the entire human population dipping below a million, and a good number of those could be infertile or past reproductive age. It's barely viable, and that's assuming that, in this day and age, everyone remaining could be cajoled or coerced into having large families. With the exception of Cecelia, none of us are exactly good role models in that regard."  
  
"Well, Jo and Finnick are both too young to be worried about that, anyway," Cecelia says.  
  
No one mentions that the rest of us would be bad candidates, anyway. Seeder is past child-bearing age, as far as I know. Berenice would probably accidentally leave a baby in morphling flophouse. Beetee has never evinced the slightest interest in kids (including the ones he mentors, though I'd never say it out loud). And then, there's me. Yeah -- I can see that. Just tip up the old liquor bottle and keep the kid quieted down until I manage to get her killed, like I've managed so far for every kid I've ever had under my care. I'd be stellar father material.  
  
"Wouldn’t do it, anyway," Jo mutters.  
  
"I would," Finnick says. "I want a houseful."  
  
"The point," Beetee says, annoyed at this turn, "is that wholescale destruction of the Capitol isn't practical. It was foolish when they did it to Thirteen. It would be omnicidally stupid to do it again."  
  
"Omnicidally?" Finnick repeats. "You made that word up."  
  
"No, I didn't. But it's not really accurate, either," Beetee admits. "We're not talking about killing everything on earth. Just making humans go extinct, which is _very_ plausible at our current population levels."  
  
"Wow, Beetee, you're getting me hot with talk like that," Jo says. "Just make a few commercials about omnicidal stupidity, and you'll have the whole country making babies."  
  
I laugh. "She's right. That's not the best advertising strategy."  
  
"I suppose I'm not the ideally passionate spokesman for the cause." He grins. "And that's not really what we're here to talk about. Just a thought to keep in mind. We need to discuss our alliance strategy."  
  
"It leaves something to be desired," I say. "And frankly, I'll sign up for Peacekeeper training before I side with the raiders on anything."  
  
"Then how _can_ we win?" Berenice asks plaintively. "Isn't it like the arena? You can't play nice if you mean to win."  
  
"She's right about that," Beetee says.  
  
No one else speaks for a minute. Finally, it's Finnick who breaks the silence. "What's the end game?" he asks.  
  
"What do you mean?" I ask.  
  
"I mean… what's the object here? Jo wants to scourge the Capitol, and Beetee doesn't think it's a good idea. But what _is_ the idea? What does the world look like when the war's over?"  
  
"We don't have time to play what-if," Cecelia says kindly. "I mean, it's a lovely question --"  
  
"I don't mean it to be lovely." Finnick stands up and looks across the moonlight, winter-bare forest. He has on a light jacket, and, away from Beetee's heater, he cups his elbows with his hands to keep in his body heat. "I mean, we can't make a plan if we aren't all going for the same objective. Haymitch -- why are we rebelling?"  
  
"To keep dirty old men from paying Snow to paw you," I say.  
  
"You were a rebel before I was born."  
  
"Fine. To keep them from paying to paw anyone else, too."  
  
Seeder smiles fondly. "Haymitch, sweetie, prostitution has survived more than one revolution over the years. There's a reason it's called the oldest profession."  
  
"Yeah, well, the president doesn't need to be personally managing it." I think about it. "Okay, yeah. If it were up to me, I'd make sure that whoever is president couldn't bully people like that."  
  
"Which is why you don't want the raiders," Finnick says. "It's putting one bully in to replace another."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"So… do we all agree that that's a _good_ thing, at least? To make it a lot harder for the president to do that?" he looks at Johanna. "Or are we more interested in revenge?"  
  
"Nothing wrong with revenge," she says defiantly.  
  
"I agree," I say. Finnick looks surprised. I shrug. "I don't want to make it a whole lifestyle, but I wouldn't mind seeing Snow fry on an electric fence. The Gamemakers, too."  
  
He sighs. "I guess I wouldn't mind that, either. But then what? And what's more important?"  
  
"I don't ever want my children's names in reaping balls," Cecelia says firmly. "And I want them to be able to… believe what they need to believe."  
  
She doesn't say it directly, but I've often suspected that there's some kind of underground religion in Eight. I don't know if I want to fight a war for it, but I don't like anyone being forced underground. I watched both of my parents hack their lungs out for years -- being underground is dangerous.  
  
"Annie wanted to say something along the same line," Finnick says. "And me. And Mags."  
  
"I don't have any problem believing what I want now," Jo says.  
  
"So, why rebel?"  
  
She shrugs. "It'd be nice for everyone to have a proper house, I guess, instead of traveling around in logging camps all year. And not everyone wants to be a lumberjack. And the ones who do want to make a fair price. They can only sell to the Capitol, and Snow's a cheap prick."  
  
"I wouldn't mind being able to make a phone call to a friend without asking permission," Seeder says.  
  
"Or having it bugged," Cecelia adds.  
  
Beetee frowns. "I suppose it would be satisfying to be able to get an invention further than a Capitol company. But that's neither here nor there."  
  
"It's here _and_ there," Finnick insists. He comes back and sits down on a log, leaning over the heater urgently. "If we have allies, we have to think about what they'd do. Are the raiders going to let people walk around freely? Go from district to district without paying them some kind of tribute? Or are they going to snatch people off the trains and toy with them before killing them? Are they going to burn down towns if we let them in?"  
  
"They already are," Berenice says, then reminds us, "Victors' Village in Nine. They burned empty houses."  
  
"So I'm not real excited about them being in charge," Finnick says.  
  
"They wouldn't be 'in charge,'" Beetee points out. "We were simply asking for assistance -- "  
  
"They're the muscle," Johanna clarifies before he can really get started.  
  
I raise an eyebrow. "And they'll still _be_ the muscle when it's time for someone to muscle their way into the presidential palace."  
  
We argue through the night. No one has any really clear idea of what we want, what the world will look like after the war, which makes planning difficult, but we manage to at least thrash out that we need to communally vet any potential allies -- no more cowboy alliances. Who we _could_ ally with, because we need allies with guns, is a more open question.  
  
"We need to ally with each other," Seeder says, as the gray dawn begins to seep into the hollow. "At the very least, we need that."  
  
"We _are_ allies," Cecelia says.  
  
"Not just us. The districts. If we can ally with each other, maybe we don't need anything else."  
  
"We can't even talk to each other." I shrug. "How do you think we should get out the message? The only thing everyone in Panem sees is the Hunger Games."  
  
"Yeah, and it's not like we can run a commercial for the rebellion after the bloodbath," Jo says.  
  
Finnick wrinkles his nose in disgust. "The bloodbath _is_ a commercial for the rebellion."  
  
"Yeah, well, it hasn't worked for the last seventy years," I say. "We'd have to -- " I stop.  
  
"What?" Beetee asks.  
  
"We'd have to hijack the Games themselves. Turn it from Snow's propaganda to ours." I blink. Something is tugging at the back of my brain, but it's not sending any coherent messages. "I need to think about that."  
  
"You're thinking of the Games because that's what you know," Seeder says kindly. "But we can't use them. They're an abomination. It would be like using… I don't even know. You're talking about using kids' deaths to argue politics."  
  
"Snow sure as hell doesn't have any problem doing that," I say. "Maybe we could use them to stop _more_ kids' deaths."  
  
No one else looks hopeful, but I can feel the idea seeping in. It's formless, a fog drifting through my brain right now. Like most of my better ideas, it's hitting me like white liquor fumes, except stronger. I still can't quite taste it, though.  
  
In the south, a puff of smoke appears along the train tracks, and Beetee grimaces. We haven't come to any conclusions, I've tossed out what he obviously considers a purely insane thought, and now the fuel train is approaching. It will load up here to bring fuel back to a train leaving Eleven. They have trains come and go every few days. There's no need to be in Twelve that often. Berenice gets things together for her signal, and we all work on collapsing the camp into tightly packed bedrolls while the little train goes up to the station and gets its cargo. We look like the world's oldest tributes in the world's smallest arena, except that we're all on the same side.  
  
There's another tug at my brain. _What if all of the tributes could be instructed to just wander around and fight mutts?_  
  
It's not quite right, but I have a vision in my head of tributes working together en masse. Letting the other districts see it.  
  
The train comes back, now loaded up. Everyone climbs into a little work car, except for Finnick and me. Berenice's ally waves to us.  
  
"Aren't you going?" I ask Finnick.  
  
"Nah. Gotta get you home. I'll hop a coal train next time one comes. Should be on Thursday."  
  
"And how are we getting to Twelve?"  
  
He grins like the little kid he is. "We had a fight with the raiders in Four. Come see what I got."  
  
We look up at the sky long enough to know that there's no nearby hovercraft, then Finnick leads the way across the tracks. We walk through the woods, following a little stream, until we come to the ruins of an old stone building. Inside it, Finnick has stashed a hovercycle. It's a Peacekeepers' model -- solar powered and fast.  
  
"You could get in a lot of trouble for having that."  
  
"Not if you've been pawed at by the right people," he says. "If the Peacekeepers drag me in on the way up, I'll say I'm joyriding, and if they give me trouble, I'll ask to speak to a certain woman. That certain woman has certain secrets that I'm pretty sure she doesn't want spread around."  
  
"I don't want to know."  
  
"Probably not," he agrees. "But if they do show up, you make a dive for the foliage and follow the tracks to Twelve."  
  
"Got it."  
  
He sighs. "It's probably too dangerous to keep around -- they could shoot me on sight and pretend they thought I was a raider, I guess -- but I figured it would be useful for this. I'll dump it somewhere after. Probably while I'm waiting for a coal train."  
  
We get on the bike. Finnick is driving; I hold on for dear life behind him. The hovertech is the only good way to get the woods quickly, other than the trains. We stay a good mile away from the tracks until we're well past the fueling station, then Finnick veers closer and begins to follow their path. By noon, the forest is starting to look familiar, and by one, I can see the distant shape of the District Twelve fence. I don't think I've ever seen it so far off from this side. It looks strange and fragile.  
  
I know I'm back when we pass by a lake, but Finnick doesn't pause here, and I'm glad. I don't want to think about the lake. He goes around the fence line, coming up on the far side of town, near the train station. It might even be near where Maysilee Donner and I once helped bury a girl from District Six, though if we are, I don't recognize the place anymore.  
  
He pulls the bike to a stop a good distance from the tracks -- we can see where the train will come around, but no one is likely to look this way. He'll have time to hop a train, unless he decides to "joyride" all the way back to Four. I don't think he's that stupid. At least I _hope_ he isn't. It occurs to me that he might have ridden the thing to the rendezvous in the first place.  
  
I decide not to ask.  
  
I get off the bike, and help him set up a little camp.  
  
"I could go in with you," he says. "I had fun in Twelve on my Victory Tour."  
  
"Which brings the total number of people having fun in Twelve to one," I say. "Stay out here. They'd notice you in town, and you know it."  
  
He nods reluctantly, and walks with me to the edge of the little clearing. He stops before we take leave of each other. "It's a good idea, you know. Using the Games. I like it."  
  
"I'll see if I can think of a way to make it work."  
  
"You will. I believe it completely. I don't think there's much you _can't_ do, Games-wise."  
  
"And another total of one person who thinks that."  
  
"You need more people in your life," he says dryly, then cracks a sunny smile. "Then again, you've got me. I love you, so that's got to count for at least five or six normal people." I have no idea what my face does when he says this, but whatever it is, it makes him roll his eyes. "More people need to say that to you."  
  
"No, they really don't."  
  
He smiles. "Take care, Haymitch."  
  
"You, too."  
  
I walk away. I'm careful as I approach the fence to not look behind me. If anyone does spot me, I'll be in trouble. No sense getting Finnick in trouble, too.  
  
No one spots me. I go further down the fence and find a loose spot I can fit under about half a mile past the station. I start to wander along on this side, holding my bottle (it actually is still half-full; I didn't drink at all last night), and eventually Darius the Peacekeeper spots me and gives me a wave.  
  
"Hey," he says. "Lost track of you yesterday."  
  
"Oh, you know me," I say. "Sneaky."  
  
"Right. Any raiders?"  
  
"No raiders."  
  
"Bastards," he says.  
  
I nod. I have no argument with the sentiment. I keep walking the fence.  
  
I don't know how long I walk, letting my mind drift, trying to see how to use the Games. I think it _can_ be done, but I don't know what circumstances I'd need, or what message I could send, not exactly. Too much depends on the vagaries of the reaping and the arenas.  
  
I've made it around a good deal of the perimeter, to the Meadow, where my father used to bring us to play with his inventions, and make our own. I look out into the woods beyond the fence. Someone out there is moving in the distance. I can't make the shape out for sure. It might even be an animal. Or Finnick, guiding his bike out of here after all.  
  
But I don't think so.  
  
Probably one of the local hunters that the Peacekeepers pretend not to know about.  
  
I watch for a while, then take a swig from the bottle and head for home.


	2. The Only Sane Woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the 64th Games, Fulvia Cardew decides that it's time to bring Plutarch back to the rebellion. (Thanks to Liam Fitzpatrick for the idea, which turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would be.)

** The Only Sane Woman **

  
I'm not a criminal by nature.  
  
I've never shoplifted or taken illicit drugs. I've never visited any of the Capitol's many prostitutes. I've never participated in my brother's get-rich-quick scams, which always seem to involve deals with people who end up reporting on him to the Peacekeepers. And I've never tried to spring him from jail.  
  
The only crime I've ever committed, other than high treason, is kidnapping.  
  
I'm not even sure it counts yet, since, at least as of this morning, Plutarch still hasn't realized that he's been kidnapped. All we've done is sit around my living room and watch movies. We slept together, mostly because it's expected -- that's why we did it when we were kids, too -- but that's never really been a key part of our relationship, and that seems not to have changed during his time at Capitol dreams. It was perfunctory, and he was more animated afterward, when we started talking about what we were reading. The movies are more important. The plays. The poetry. The politics… if I can get him back to them.  
  
When I left for work this morning, I programmed the television to run a series of movies, interspersed with believable current commercials, that I think he'll sit still through. I hope he will, anyway. The early ones are entirely innocuous. Later in the run are some we used to analyze together for secret messages. Nothing _overt_ , of course, or they'd never have been produced, but we know -- well, Plutarch _used_ to know -- that there's more than one way to hear a story, and that if people are careful with what's on the surface, they can slip a lot in underneath it.  
  
It's a risk, but I had to take it. He told me he was on vacation -- his first in three years -- since he successfully completed his studies as a Gamemaker, and asked me out on a date (another first in that amount of time). It may be my only chance to get to him when no one is expecting to see him right away. I only have three days. I couldn't get time off today, but _maybe_ I can work on getting him back where he belongs during my weekend. I think he wants to come back. He's never betrayed us (despite what the others think) and I've sometimes seen him in the restaurant, his eyes suddenly going distant, his voice stopping mid-sentence before he picks up again. He knows something's wrong. That's got to be why he asked me out again. I mean, I've been pretending, so I can stay in his circle, but I'm not _that_ good an actress. And I'm definitely part of his old life. His new friends snicker at me behind my back.  
  
I may have to explain the fact that my door is locked from the inside. I rehearse the explanation in my mind as the bus crosses behind the train station.  
  
_Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize I'd left that on. Security, feature, you know. If there's an intruder, I can lock myself in the bedroom and keep him out here until the Peacekeepers come. I didn't realize it engaged this morning! I hope you didn't miss anything important. You know, I was just thinking about that old show you made up in school -- remember it?_  
  
Then -- presuming he hasn't lost his patience and I haven't lost my last chance -- I'll bring in the old episodes of _Plutarch's Lives._ We were in high school when we did that, in the arts and culture track. It was picked up as a contest winner. Only five episodes aired before the Culture Authority became suspicious. They couldn't pin anything down exactly. What could they really say about a show whose sole message was that one boy made a difference in fairly trivial personal affairs? It's not like they admit that it's a dangerous message. Half of Snow's propaganda is about how important each and every one of us is to the glory of the Capitol. They couldn't very well say that they had a problem with _that_.  
  
So we didn't get into any trouble, but with the exception of my personal copies, the whole thing disappeared down the Capitol's very large rabbit hole. By the time the Quarter Quell was over, even the district rebels had forgotten about it in the horror of the double-reaping. I doubt anyone missed that the Quell was a retaliation for the defiance of a few bands of kids. The youth rebellion, so much a part of our lives at that point, disappeared as cleanly as the show did.  
  
Except that I still have the show. Except that the poems written by that year's victor, Haymitch Abernathy, are still circulating in certain corners of the Capitol, passed solemnly around dingy back rooms, whispered in the cold nights -- call and response, a symbol of recognition.  
  
_How many gore streaked stripes on your back?  
  
Twenty-five, and every one to be paid back with interest._  
  
The bus pulls up to my stop, and I get out, pulling my cheap coat tightly around myself to cover the dress I work in. It's a season out of date, so I suppose it's not fashionable, but it's more than anyone around here can afford. Plutarch got me a good deal before I kidnapped him. He's still kind to me. He wants me to join Capitol Dreams with him, and be a hostess for their parties, instead of an accountant for the chic restaurant where they all lunch together.  
  
"We could live together, Fulvia! You could live on the lake shore, in a penthouse! You don't need to live by the station!"  
  
I shake my head.  
  
It's not that I'd mind living in his penthouse, and being away from the leering, mocking boys who line the streets as I head home. I wouldn't mind taking permanent leave of my brother, who is out of jail again and over to beg for money once a week, as he has ever since he found out that he had a sister with a job. I hate the garbage on the fire escapes and the cheap knock-offs for sale in the storefronts, and I hate that in this neighborhood, I'm still treated like the ugly little girl who once tried to organize a street-cleaning squad. I went door to door with a petition and a sign-up sheet, and expected fifty people. I'd saved my allowance for weeks to buy brooms and cleaning things, and loaded them up in my wagon.  
  
I ended up standing alone, my arms full of old rags, a bucket hanging off my elbow, while people jeered at me as they passed by. I finally sat down on my laden wagon and started to cry, which didn't help matters. For two years, they called me "Dustrag," and made mocking crying noises when I went by.  
  
Even getting into the arts and culture school didn't help, as I was now a pretentious faker on top of it, but I did meet Plutarch. He was rich, smart, funny, and idealistic. I don't know what he saw in me, except that I may have been the only girl in his circle who shared his essential disinterest in physicality. When I decided to try another neighborhood cleanup -- not in my own neighborhood -- he took the ball and ran with it. With him in charge, we had a hundred people show up. We gave out fresh lemonade and scrubbed up buildings and streets until they shone.  
  
Of course, prices went up the next year in that neighborhood, and a lot of people had to move, but no one blamed Plutarch for that. When Plutarch decides to do something, it ends up done properly.  
  
So no, I wouldn't mind living with him in his fine penthouse on the lake. I just insist that it actually be _him_ , and not this creature that Capitol Dreams has built on top of him.  
  
My apartment is two blocks from the bus stop, and I make the walk in five minutes, my head bent down, watching my feet as they pound along the gum-dotted sidewalk. I took off my heels before I started home. I barely get around in them where the sidewalks are clean. I'm wearing beat-up old sneakers that I've had for years. I keep them hidden in my locker at work, and sneak quickly into the ladies' room at the party center to change them before any of my colleagues can see.  
  
I reach the small newsstand that's on the first floor of my building and go through the glass door that leads to the narrow stairway. Most people miss it the first time in the neighborhood. I go up past the second floor (a pair of older women who don't hear very well) and get to my door on the third floor. I can hear the television through the door, and something smells good in the kitchen.  
  
I put my key in the lock and rehearse my little speech again, but when I get in, Plutarch is just humming and stirring some vegetables in the skillet. "Hey!" he says, grinning. "You look beat. I figured you could use dinner."  
  
"Thank you." I take off my coat and hang it on the coat tree by the door. "Did you have a good day?"  
  
"Yes. It's been so long since I've had a few days off! I did some writing."  
  
"You did? Can I see?"  
  
He shakes his head. "I threw it out. It didn't make sense. Do you have any wine?"  
  
"In the cupboard above the stove."  
  
"Great. I'm making risotto with lamb. I saw some in your fridge. Is that all right? I've spent so much time ordering in restaurants, I forgot that I like cooking!"  
  
"You've always been good at it," I say.  
  
"Yes. Maybe I should have been a chef instead of a Gamemaker."  
  
I sit down. "Maybe. But you were always interested in the media, too. Remember _Plutarch's Lives_?"  
  
He laughs and pours me a glass of wine. "You know, I found myself thinking about that just today. That was fun. I haven't produced a show for so long! They may let me produce a few segments during the Games."  
  
"That's… great." I bite my lip. "It could be a chance to really show more of Panem. We used to want to set something in the districts."  
  
"Mm." He stirs the wine into the risotto. "The districts are so brutish, though." He sighs. "It would be nice if we could elevate them. We could let go a little bit if they hadn't proven over and over that they weren't so violent. It's a shame that the Capitol still needs to maintain such a tight grip -- I've liked so many of the victors I've met -- but really, the risk…" He looks out the window, his eyes going blank again, then slowly, his face comes to life, like machinery under his skin is warming up. "I suppose you're still with the old crowd?"  
  
He's asked me this before. I don't know if he's trying to gage whether or not he can expose his own questions to me or if he's trying to find out where we've hidden our small arsenal. I always err on the side of caution. I want him back, but the real Plutarch is the one who warned me not to trust him if he ended up in Capitol Dreams. He'd consider the rebellion more important. So do our old friends, who think my entire mission is a waste of time. "Oh, you know," I say. "We've all grown up a little."  
  
He gives a bright, Capitol Dreams grin. "We sure have. It's hard to imagine what we used to be like. We were playing with some very dangerous toys."  
  
"Well, there are a lot of those lying around." I brace myself. "The Gamemakers have a few dangerous weapons themselves."  
  
I see his shoulders tense. "I wondered if you still thought that way."  
  
I don't answer.  
  
He finishes pouring the wine in with the rice and seasonings, then tightens the top of the pressure cooker. "It's _really_ about making things _less_ deadly," he says. "It's like this pressure cooker. If I just yank the top off, everything will explode." He looks at me imploringly. "You know it's true, Fulvia. I remember our meetings as well as you do. If the Peacekeepers ever let go… the whole country will explode."  
  
"But sooner or later, you finish cooking, let the steam off, and open it."  
  
He smiles at me, faintly puzzled, then opens up into the bright grin again. "Well, our whole metaphor falls apart when you remember that the point of cooking is to eat. I don't really want to eat Panem." He laughs. "Well, not in the political sense, of course. Panem is bread, when you think about it, so we eat it all the time. But generally not from a pressure cooker."  
  
I let the metaphor go. "Why did we name the country 'bread,' anyway? Does anyone at Dreams have a theory?"  
  
"No one at Dreams," he says, then his eyes go a little bit distant. "But I remember… in the Sons of the Founding…" He looks up suddenly, realizing that he's mentioned the long-disbanded group. It's another thing we share. I’m in the Daughters -- another thing I'm teased about, since my neighbors think it's only for rich women, even though it's explicitly about celebrating Capitol history -- and he told me once that the Sons still meet, secretly, in the caves by the lake. He claimed at the time that it was mostly to gamble and look at magazines they didn't want their mothers to see, but I've learned since that they also took several historical documents into hiding, to prevent Snow from destroying them. They are generally as likely to be looking at them as at the girlie magazines, though they mostly don't admit it. I have no idea what the adult Sons pretend to be doing, or where they meet. Plutarch breathes harshly for a minute, apparently having trouble connecting himself with an illegal group. Finally, he comes back to the surface and says, "Well, you know, the _guys_. We always had to have a secret identity." He rolls his eyes. "Anyway, one of the guys said it was because, after the Catastrophes, when the Capitol first settled and started farming, and most people were still just wandering around, the nomads started calling the city 'the Breadbasket.' And of course, the Capitol became Panem. I mean, the Capitol _is_ Panem. And I guess it just sounded better in Latin. With the basket part dropped."  
  
"It would sound somewhat silly to pledge our undying devotion to the well-being of Bread."  
  
He mucks around with the lamb a little bit, then says, "You know, I wonder why we have a name at all."  
  
"I beg your pardon."  
  
"Historically, isolated people have just called themselves things that boil down to 'the land' or 'the people' or 'the language.' We developed flags and names to differentiate ourselves from other nations we might end up on a battlefield with."  
  
"People remembered what it used to be," I guess. "So they picked up symbols."  
  
"In that case, why not the _old_ symbols?"  
  
"We did keep an eagle."  
  
"Everyone used eagles. I’m not sure it's the old eagle we kept."  
  
"I suppose they wanted to disassociate themselves with the old country. It was pretty deep in the wars. And the civil wars when the oceans came up… they were nasty."  
  
"I guess." He frowns. "But no worse than anywhere else. No better, either, just luckier with the long-term consequences, but no worse."  
  
"We're not really the same people, though. Except for the Outer Districts. They were pre-established, and I guess that Twelve, especially, is still the old Appalachian population, and Eleven was colonized by indigenous nomad groups, as far as we can tell. But Panem got its name before we annexed the Outer Districts" -- the word _annexed_ is carefully chosen as a contrast to the preferred narrative of Capitol Dreams, in which Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen were _welcomed_ , but I don't stress it -- "and our people came in from everywhere, with the in-Gathering, then spread out again when we formed the districts. That's why only a few people in the Capitol are Sons and Daughters of the Founding. So they wanted to start with something new, without all the old baggage." I bite my lip. "Though I seem to recall that you always liked the baggage."  
  
He freezes, his hand stopping abruptly mid-stir. "I -- don't --" He blinks rapidly, then mechanically forces a smile across his face. "Well, some of it was made of pretty ideas, though the whole thing fell apart fast enough once the fighting started. Like a lot of pretty things, it didn't stand up to a pounding. Authority is ugly sometimes, but sadly necessary."  
  
That momentary freeze spooks me, and I decide to let it be. Ugly ideas, apparently, can't take too much of a pounding before they fall apart, either, but I have a feeling that right now, he'll do anything to keep those ideas together, rather than let them fall apart.  
  
We talk about the utterly inconsequential while he finishes cooking, and while we eat together. An old schoolmate of ours has taken up a marriage contract, and plans a lavish, week-long affair in August, after the Games. One of the Gamemakers has an embarrassing condition that he picked up in the Pleasure District. Another one -- a young kid just out of school, by the name of Seneca Crane -- got in trouble for spending work time reading absurd romance novels. I've been working on writing a play that's going to be produced at our old school (I don't mention that it has a lot of hidden rebel symbolism). He wants to write again as well.  
  
"What did you start to write today?" I ask him, putting the dishes in to wash. "You said you threw something out."  
  
"Oh, right. I was going to try my hand at a new series. I made up a few ideas, but I kept coming back to one about a victor living in the Capitol. I even had Haymitch Abernathy in mind, believe it or not -- talk about a fish out of water story!" He shakes his head at the absurdity, though in fact, Haymitch actually fits in quite well in many parts of the Capitol. "Of course, that could never happen anyway, so it was ridiculous."  
  
"You could probably get Mimi Meadowbrook to star in it."  
  
He laughs. "Oh, yes. Mimi. She's still quite besotted with him, if you can believe it after all this time."  
  
And that ends any chance of this turning into a conversation about challenging the norms, because he's off on another round of gossip about who's sleeping with whom, and who's been seen in absurd clothes, and why the beautiful actress, now a leader in Capitol Dreams, still thinks of the drunken District Twelve victor as "the one who got away." Not that this has stopped her from netting a lot of other men and women since. She just throws them all back as a matter of course these days.  
  
This turns into an extremely distasteful Gamemakers' view of the victors, who Plutarch is apparently encouraged to think of as performing monkeys, even though he knows them. I prod him with the fact that he used to be Haymitch's friend -- of sorts -- but he brushes it off with an airy, "Oh, I haven't had time to talk to the mentors for a few years."  
  
I know the translation of this is really that Capitol Dreams has made sure he's never put into contact with such undesirables anymore -- he might start to get funny ideas -- but again, I decide not to push it. I have two more days.  
  
We go to my bedroom and watch the news from my bed, where I have a ceiling screen so I don't have to sit up, then have dessert while we watch a movie together. We don't bother with anything else.  
  
He's already up when I wake up in the morning, and his mood isn't quite as good. He's discovered that my door is locked from the inside, and only grudgingly accepts my explanation about security. He wants to go outside. I'm not about to let him go alone, but I'm not ready for him to be suspicious yet.  
  
I pull on some old sneakers and leisure clothes, and we take a city bus to the beach. He reminds me that he has a car, and we don't need to depend on buses anymore. I tell him that it's better if we don't have to worry about parking. He seems all right with this.  
  
We spend the morning in the water, having splash fights and talking about absolutely nothing that matters. Kidnapping and brainwashing is considerably more difficult for me than it was for the government. We meet some of his friends, and they look at me like I'm an alien, but he puts his arm around me and says, "You know my girl, Fulvia," and there's no further questioning. One of the girls says that it looks like my makeup has "smudged" in the water, and helps me "re-do" it, bringing me a little more up to date. We go out on a boat, and they dance and play, but they don't talk politics. I'm not sure how to bring the subject back up, since everything they're doing is harmless… except that it keeps him stimulated and in their world.  
  
I have no idea how I'm supposed to compete with this. I hear their names from time to time, but I have no idea which name goes with which of them.  
  
It's about six-thirty when we start talking about dinner. I try to talk up the idea of cooking, since Plutarch enjoyed it so much last night, but it's a non-starter. Restaurants are the order of the moment, and none of the ones they bring up is in my budget.  
  
"There's Eagle Feather," the woman who helped with my make-up suggests. "I haven't tried it yet, but it's supposedly got District Six food."  
  
One of Plutarch's other friends snorts. "What… laced with morphling?"  
  
There are general, mean-spirited giggles at this. Over the last ten years or so, District Six has developed a big problem with abuse of the painkiller. Someone is bringing it in. They spearheaded our last youth rebellion, using their access to transportation to create lines of communication, and Plutarch _used_ to know that this was retaliation, but he doesn't seem to anymore. He laughs with the rest.  
  
Other restaurants come up. Cossina, a spicy food restaurant where you have to reach through flames to get your food (burn specialists are on hand, but it's a mark of sophistication if you don't burn yourself). Forget Me Not, which features food both made with flowers and made to look like flowers, so you seem to be eating a garden. The Crow's Nest, which is all seafood, with a District Four theme. Taste of Panem, where there are serial feasts with food inspired by all the districts -- including a still-smoking flamed dessert that represents Thirteen, which gets another laugh. I hope no one brings up the restaurant where I work (The Emerald Eye), as I suspect my colleagues wouldn't treat me as a proper customer, and in this, I'm lucky. The Eye is seen as a lunch place for middle-aged bureaucrats and their trainees.  
  
I suggest a few down-market places, trying to pretend that they just haven't been "discovered" yet, but no one bites. I catch Plutarch looking over at me a few times, then suddenly, he says, "You know, I want to celebrate my exams. And my vacation. Let's call it my treat for everyone, at the Gold Leaf."  
  
No one argues with this. The Gold Leaf is the most fashionable -- and most expensive -- restaurant in town. It takes normal people three weeks to get reservations, but Plutarch, as usual, knows someone who knows someone, who in turn knows someone else, and an hour later, they've set up a special table for us up on the roof, surrounded by rose covered trellises, and the alcohol is flowing freely. A couple of the others are also taking mood pills, and the woman who helped me earlier pulls out a handheld steamer and starts inhaling deeply.  
  
I've never seen anyone actually take Libi before. I thought it was one of the myths that occasionally goes around about party drugs. But that's definitely what it is. It's supposed to be very dangerous, with something that raises the body temperature beyond safe limits. If so, it doesn't seem to be hurting her much. She sighs in ecstasy as it settles in, then pulls off her remaining clothes and starts petting me. When I don't respond, she switches to the man sitting on her other side.  
  
Across the table, Plutarch rolls his eyes at me and grins, almost the old grin, the one he had when loyalists were acting ridiculous.  
  
They bring our food, which comes on sheets of gold foil. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu without looking at anything other than the price (which is still equal to my week's food budget). It turns out to be a pasta dish, tossed with artichokes, cheese, and shrimp. It's tasty enough. I pretend to love it. The others have gotten steaks and lamb and rare poultry. One man orders peacock breast, nested in a ring of roast mockingjays. I see Plutarch looking at it, vaguely troubled. He has a moment of blankness, like I've seen at the Eye, then he powers up again.  
  
"So," he says jovially, "does anyone want to drop by the party at the end of the Victory Tour? I can get ten invites."  
  
The girl beside me claps her hands. "I forgot it was almost time! When does it start? I _love_ Diamond. He's so handsome."  
  
"In two days," Plutarch tells her. "The crews are already on the way to District Twelve to kick it off."  
  
This occasions ribald laughter. "Yeah," one of the men says, "it's always a party out there in the sticks. Probably why their only victor tried to snuff himself last Games."  
  
"Oh, that's not true," my neighbor says. "He just had a little too much fun during the after parties."  
  
"Not what _I_ heard," the man sniffs. "I heard it was just 'Goodbye, cruel world,' after his idiot tribute decided to rush on a stronger alliance." He snorts. "Or maybe he just finally figured out that he's a worthless drunk."  
  
Plutarch frowns. "I know Haymitch Abernathy. He's not… well, he drinks a bit, but he's hardly worthless. He's actually quite a good mentor."  
  
"Right, that explains his string of victors!" There's great merriment at this.  
  
One of them mimes slicing his neighbor's throat, the way Nasseh Rutledge's throat was cut when he rushed the inner district camp. "What's Abernathy's count so far, anyway? Twenty-eight tributes down?"  
  
"Hey," I say. "It's dead kids."  
  
The woman shrugs. "Twenty-eight less backward hicks… who'd probably have ended up making a hundred more backward hicks. It's not like they were going to do anything important with their lives, except maybe impregnate their cousins."  
  
The laughter at this jape is deafening in the small space. The sexual habits of the districts are always fodder for jokes, which somehow make them prudish and perverse in the same breath.  
  
I expect Plutarch to put a stop to it -- even now, he's not one for this kind of thing -- but again, he's gone far away, and by the time he comes back to himself this time, the conversation has moved on to which victors are the prettiest, and what next year's arena will be.  
  
We finish eating and Plutarch doesn't invite people back to his place. I remind him that he still has things at my place, and he hires a car to take us back across town. I don't lock the doors, but he doesn't even bring up the possibility of leaving.  
  
We go to my room and watch some of the preliminary programming for the Sixty-Fourth Victory Tour. There's a special on the District One spa, up in the mountains, built around some hot springs. Plutarch has been there with his family, and he tells me about it in a quiet way. He's still thinking about something.  
  
Finally, when the evening talk shows come on, I turn off the television. "What's on your mind?" I ask. I don't prod any further. I don't want to risk him getting defensive.  
  
"Fulvia… do you still talk to our old friends?"  
  
I nod, but don't elaborate.  
  
He shakes his head. "I'm not asking to jam you up. It's not like I don't know who they are. No one even asks me about them, anyway. I just wanted to know what they're saying about Haymitch's accident. Did he… I mean, what do the other victors think?"  
  
"I really don't know much," I say. "They… his escort found him. He took pills with his booze. It could have been an accident."  
  
Plutarch shakes his head. "Haymitch isn't a pill popper, and he knows what can happen when you mix them. He's not stupid. He must have thought the Rutledge kid had a real chance. He _was_ doing well. It's too bad. He could've been a good victor. Good for Twelve. And probably good for Haymitch to have a neighbor out there."  
  
I try to think how to turn this conversation to politics. It seems like a good start. At least this isn't the Capitol Dreams line. I can't come up with anything, so I just say, "Haymitch is definitely smart. I wonder why he doesn't write anymore."  
  
"Given what he used to write, it's probably safer that he doesn't."  
  
"You remember what he used to write?"  
  
Plutarch nods, but doesn't elaborate. He strokes my hair for a while, then turns off the light. We go to sleep.  
  
When I wake up in the morning, the apartment is empty.  
  
I panic. I can't imagine when I'll get another chance. In one more day, he'll be back with the Gamemakers, and all he'll get is their poison. They might even ask him to report on me. _He_ may have believed my falderal about a new security system making the doors lock from inside, but they won't. No. They'll be suspicious enough about me. They know I was his friend before he needed re-education. They _have_ to know that I'm not one of them.  
  
I sit down on my ratty couch, breathing harshly. I can hear the sound of it whistling in my ears.  
  
I almost don't notice when the door opens.  
  
"Hey," Plutarch says cheerfully, coming in, his arms laden with shopping bags. "I got us breakfast."  
  
I look up.  
  
He puts the bags down, alarmed. "Are you alright, Fulvia? You look a little pale."  
  
"I'm fine," I manage.  
  
He doesn't pretend to believe me, but he doesn't push it, either. "I couldn't sleep last night," he says. "I didn't want to wake you -- "  
  
"You didn't."  
  
" -- so I just got up and wandered around a little. I noticed you were low on a few things. And I… I looked for something to read. Because I didn't want to wake you up by turning on the television. And I didn't want to watch. I wanted to think. I don't have time to think much."  
  
I don't say anything.  
  
He sits down in my reading chair and pulls out a battered old journal. I close my eyes. It's Haymitch Abernathy's poetry book. "You've got this," he says.  
  
I nod, then open my eyes. He's not looking angry, or accusatory. "I… I still read it sometimes. _We_ still read it."  
  
He looks at it. "This thing caused a lot of trouble, you know. Pelagia Pepper ended up getting caught because of it. They used to ask me about that. Did I know she was a rebel? Did she make me a rebel?"  
  
"Why would they ask you about that?"  
  
"I don't know. I don't think _they_ know, honestly. I'm pretty sure they don't think I was really a rebel at all. I just had more unorthodox thoughts than was strictly appropriate for a Gamemakers' apprentice. I got 'exhausted' right after I said something about the old District Council. Just history, you know? They don't like history. They pay it lip service if it suits their purposes -- or if they can twist it to suit their purposes -- but they don't really like it. Too much gray area. Too many places where people don't act the way they're supposed to." He smiles faintly. "The facts don't fit the models, so the facts have to be changed."  
  
"Oh, I'm sure they don't change facts…"  
  
"You know perfectly well that they do. Why do you think I wanted to come back to you? You're the only totally sane person I know." He grins. "Even if you did kidnap me."  
  
My jaw drops. "Plutarch!"  
  
"Come on, Fulvia. Security systems?" He shakes his head. "I know better. But I never intended to leave. I've been thinking about coming back to you for a long, long time, I think. I've missed you." He sighs. "Who am I? What have I been doing? What have I _done_? I keep thinking about it, and I can't square it. They hate _history_. I can't talk about it with anyone."  
  
"You can talk about it with me. With… with _us_. All of your old friends."  
  
He laughs. "I seriously doubt I'd be able to just walk back in."  
  
This isn't true. He can walk in anywhere he wants to, and make them accept him. "I bet you could."  
  
"Maybe. Maybe not. But I'll tell you one thing, Fulvia: It won't do anyone any good if I _do_. I'd lose my job for sure."  
  
"Your job! But… you shouldn't _do_ this job! You're better than this!"  
  
"Do you have anyone else as well-placed as I am?" He shakes his head. "Don't bother telling me that you can't answer. I know you can't. But I don't think you do."  
  
I sigh. "Plutarch, your Dreams friends don't trust _me_. They'll know something's up even if you don't meet with anyone else."  
  
He thinks about it. "It's a lucky thing that I finally talked you into moving in with me, then," he says. "I mean, my nice place up by the lake. You finally understood that it was time to grow up. Right?"  
  
I nod.  
  
He smiles at me. "Good. Then why don't you start packing? I'll write an ad for you to sublet this place. It's a good location. It shouldn't take long." He goes to my computer and starts writing.  
  
I go back to my room and start putting things into a bag.  
  
I'm not stupid. I know that I could get there and find people ready to take me away for "exhaustion," to put me in their therapy sessions, to offer me glamor and acceptance in return for obedience.  
  
But I risk it.  
  
I'm a criminal, after all.


	3. For the Love of the Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the rebellion ends, seventeen-year-old Coriolanus Snow pitches an idea for proper vengeance.

**For the Love of the Games**  
"This is no place for jokes," an old man says, glaring at me across the table.  
  
I ignore him, keeping my eyes on our president, Antonius Clemm. Clemm is the smartest person at the table, other than me, and if that doesn't encapsulate the tragedy of Panem, I don't know what does.  
  
Clemm looks back at me, his long fingers steepled under his chin. "Interesting."  
  
There's silence, then a redheaded woman in her military uniform stands up, shoving her chair roughly against the table and making the pitcher of water spill. "You can't seriously be considering this, Tony," she says, waving at a servant to wipe the table. "I don't even know why you let this seventeen-year-old _child_ speak here." She gives me a wave none too distinct from the one she gave the servant. "Other than a moment's temper tantrum on camera, he's done nothing."  
  
"The temper tantrum," Clemm says, "was what pushed the Capitol to pursue victory instead of compromise. When young Mr. Snow refused rescue by that District brat, it captured the imagination of our angry citizens. That shot of him coming up from the rubble and pushing the girl away is on half the posters in the Capitol. He's been a symbol of their fury ever since, and if I didn't invite him, they would tear down the walls and possibly hang us along with the rebels."   
  
This is utter nonsense, of course. Not that some idiots have decided that I'm a great hero of the Capitol --- they have, and it's annoying -- but that this has anything to do with Clemm's inviting me here. That has more to do with information I gathered from a particular underage servant in his house, whose duties are somewhat more complex than wiping up spills. All it took was a small mention that I was friends with this particular servant, and we talked all the time, to get whatever invitations I wanted.  
  
A second old man shakes his head. "Whipping up mobs has always been easy."  
  
"It's _using_ them that takes skill," I finish.  
  
"No," he says. "It's dissipating them that takes skill. People are angry, and they have a right to be. Bombing a school was beyond the pale. But sooner or later, they will remember who put the school there and why, and they _will_ turn on their own government. And once we're gone, they'll start turning on each other. The Capitol will be left in ruins."  
  
"The Capitol is already in ruins," I point out. "What I'm suggesting is that we turn our attention to rebuilding it, rather than doing something that will provoke the districts again."  
  
"You don't think that putting their children into arenas and telling them to kill one another will provoke them?" Clemm asks.  
  
"That's the genius of it," I say. "They're already angry at the people who got them into this war. Put _their_ children in as a mode of justice, and most of the district people -- who also lost their children to this pointless rebellion -- will go along with it. They might even be enthusiastic, if we sell it right. Then do it again next year. And the next. Every year, they'll watch children from other districts killing children from their own. They'll hate each other more than us."  
  
"And if they refuse?" the redheaded woman asks.  
  
"Then, they'll learn just how hot the bombs we dropped on Thirteen are."  
  
The first man slaps his hand down. "Dammit, that's dangerous to everyone! We shouldn’t have bombed Thirteen, quite frankly."  
  
"And how would you explain _that_ , Rathfon?" Clemm asks. "They murder five hundred children, and we respond with negotiations?"  
  
"Have you seen the numbers from the last census?" Rathfon says. "Just before the war -- _before the war_ \-- we were at barely five million human beings left on the planet. It's quite possible that we lost nearly half the population before you bombed Thirteen, most of the lost in prime reproductive years. Then you bombed Thirteen, a city the same size as the Capitol. That's got to be nearly a sixth of whatever was left. If we top two million in the next census, I'll be shocked. The lack of genetic diversity…" He puts his hands up helplessly.  
  
"They want vengeance for their dead children," Clemm says. "They won't care about census numbers or genetic diversity."  
  
I wait for this to sink in, then say, "The Games would solve that, as well. They'd be a symbolic vengeance, but ultimately, they'd only take twenty-three children each year. Their parents would most likely still be young enough to be able to have new children to replace them, if it came to genetic preservation." I shrug. "We could even require it."  
  
I make it sound casual, like it's an idea I just thought of, but it's calculated, and it has the right effect. The adults go into a full scale argument about whether or not the parents of dead contestants should be required to have replacement children. Of course, they'll never go there. It would be impossible to enforce, and it's ultimately inconsequential, statistically, to have twenty-three children die. But once they're arguing about the details, the general structure is taken for granted. Beyond this, the details don't interest me much.  
  
I take out my carefully crafted presentation, and pass out copies to everyone while they argue about things that don't matter. I tell them to look over the plans, then pretend to worry about the propriety of my being here, and leave while they examine it. They'll start picking apart a dozen sections that I've left in for that purpose, and by the time they leave tonight, the notion of the arena will be set in their minds. I expect Clemm to call by next week to ask me to take over the planning. This won't be because I'm blackmailing him. It's because I'm the only one of the whole ridiculous bunch of them that understands sports.  
  
I head out into the winter afternoon and walk through the rubble-strewn streets. There are weeping people on every corner, and the whole place looks like some disease-ridden sinkhole from before the Catastrophes. I'm going to fix that.  
  
The Games are nothing more than an exaggerated version of a playground game called King of the Hill. The contestants will complain and probably cry, but the smarter ones will start to work out strategies before they've even admitted to themselves that they mean to play. Then they'll have to test the strategies. Then, they'll be playing, and everyone in the Capitol will recognize that it's just the districts destroying themselves again, now without risking any Capitol lives and, quite honestly, very few district lives. Not that this will matter to Rathfon's vaunted genetic diversity. I doubt we'll let more than handful into the Capitol in any given year, and most of them will just end up rutting with each other until every district breeds true (District Twelve already does, as far as I can tell), and they can be shown like engineered dogs in a best-of-breed show, but I don't actually care about that, either.   
  
It doesn't ultimately matter to me if the districts are punished for bombing a building that our government knew perfectly well was in danger, and put children into anyway. What matters to me is that they obey. That we don't disrupt the culture any further. Putting all of this in the form of a game makes it a civilian matter. Our military is full of idiots, even bigger idiots than the ones in the civilian bureaucracy, and I have no intention of leaving Panem's culture in the hands of people who are indistinguishable from the idiots we just bombed to dust in Thirteen. The Capitol should control Panem through the culture. The military should only be there in case the people decide to do something stupid again.  
  
They won't. The districts, I mean. They've had enough. They'll be looking north at the smoking crater of District Thirteen, and at the burning streets of their own cities, and all we'll really need to do is put someone who looks fierce in place over them. They'll know that the real power is the ultimate power: To destroy them utterly. And they'll grumble, but they'll behave. They'll play the Games. And in the end, they'll try to win them. I'm looking forward to seeing what the smarter ones do.  
  
In the meantime, I'll get the Capitol to stop its incessant weeping and gnashing of teeth.  
  
I've always hated crying.  
  
Not my own. As far as I can remember, I've never cried. I must have as an infant. They all do, day and night. But even I can't remember back that far.  
  
My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair, in a row of identical high chairs, looking out a dirty window at the train yards. Since I know the Care Group moves children out of there like clockwork on their second birthdays, I must have been under two. I was left there as a six-month old -- a baby in a blanket, lying in the snow on the doorstep -- so that's an eighteen month window that the memory might have occurred in. I don't pretend to remember what I was thinking, if children of that age think, but I do remember that whoever the child beside me was, the caregiver was paying it attention while it cried. I wasn't receiving any sort of attention, therefore I was not crying. Any meaning I ascribe to this would be after-the-fact, so I'll refrain from making judgments. I may not have despised that child on that day. Later on, I would.  
  
The next set of memories jumble together a little, while I was in the home for two to four year olds. There were building blocks with letters on them, and it was there that I made that flash of connection between written and spoken language. I watched a flickering television, and saw the man reading, with the words slipping by underneath. I started picking them up, and playing with the blocks, trying to imagine how my own name would look. There weren't enough blocks (whoever gave me the name "Coriolanus" was clearly not thinking about spelling practice), and no one helped me, or believed me when I read the tattered little books in the home's absurd collection. They thought I was faking it, or had somehow memorized them from our thrice-yearly visits from public figures who read to us. Because of that, I spelled my own name wrong until I was almost six.  
  
I remember pain when I broke my ankle falling down the stairs. I was already the fastest runner. I remember the break and the pain, and I remember screaming, but not crying. I think I was older at that time, closer to four than to two, because I actually remember the story the caregiver told me. I've read it since and know it better, but I recognized it as soon as I saw it in a book. Once upon a time, there was a land called Sparta, where everyone was trained to be brave. A boy stole a fox and hid it under his shirt, but he was caught by their peacekeepers. Rather than admitting that he stole it and taking a whipping for it, he was silent while it ate him alive, and no one knew until he was dead that anything was eating him. _Aren't you just our little Spartan?_ the caregiver said, smiling at me while they set my ankle at a local hospital.   
  
I was in the next group home (the four to six year olds) when I can start to pinpoint memories for sure. I got into trouble for the first time just before my fifth birthday. A boy in my ward started crying and I told him to stop it. He kept going, so I went over and put my hand over his mouth, the way the grown-ups sometimes put a finger on kids' mouths if they were being loud. Only I covered his nose, too, by accident, and he couldn't breathe right. It interested me, so I pressed harder, until he fought away from me and started screaming.   
  
A caregiver came over then and pulled me off and told me that I was a wicked boy, and then there were visits with the child psychiatrists. I took tests. I told them my memories. They harangued me about not crying (this was apparently a matter of great import), and found a dozen ways to ask if I'd liked hurting that boy (in fact, I didn't care about it one way or another, though I knew enough even then to go on and on about being sorry). They ran blood tests on me, which I suppose were meant to find my parents. If they were, they had no luck with it, as no one suddenly appeared to take me home, not even grudgingly.  
  
The one good thing that came of these sessions was that they realized I wasn't faking it when I read. They gave me science games and math and stories, and it was finally determined that I needed more mental stimulation than the group homes could give me. They weren't in the practice of giving out potentially violent children for adoption -- we weren't the sort that adoptive parents wanted -- but they did put me in a good school. There were boarding facilities for district children, but things were already going badly. There were only six other people in boarding at the time, since most students from the Capitol commuted. Four of them were from District Thirteen. The other two came from One and Twelve. The boy from One was my roommate, and we teamed up sometimes to play pranks on the girls next door, Thirteeners who made a religious principle of having no sense of humor at all. The other three people -- a boy and girl from Thirteen, and the boy from Twelve -- were all teenagers, and we didn't see them much.  
  
None of us were big on crying, and attention came from winning at sports and in class work. It was relief after the group homes. Sports and class work have always come naturally to me, and somewhere in the environment, I learned to be better at the other things, like laughing and playing and joking. I started to get along with the other children from the Capitol, and spend summers and holidays with their families. Once I got to be ten years old, no one was expected to cry much anymore, so no one hectored me on the subject. By the time I was fifteen (the District boarders were long gone by then, and I lived alone in the boarding halls), I was everyone's favorite party guest. Everyone's parents liked my jokes, and being called a "wicked boy" was no longer an insult.   
  
One of my teachers suggested that I explore my wickedness with her. It was apparently of a sufficient level, as she gave me very good grades on my papers, but I didn't care for it. It seemed to be a lot of effort to get to what amounted to a full body sneeze, and after, she insisted on inane small talk. The whole thing gave me about the same enjoyment level as a prolonged cold, and once she'd graded my last paper for her class, I told her that I wouldn't come around anymore. She didn't press the issue, and I haven't bothered looking for that sort of thing since.  
  
I might have gone on like that for a long time, just coasting through Capitol society. I could have gotten anywhere. I was already a star athlete in town, and I arranged our first intermural championships when I was fourteen. No one had really thought to have students from the different schools play each other. I set up brackets in basketball and baseball, and meets for the gymnasts and wrestlers. There was only one school that did equestrian, and I arranged for them to do a demonstration in city center. The war made their usual parade grounds outside the city unusable. But everyone loved it, so I already had the ear of people in the Capitol government, and when the Green Tower fell, suddenly, they decided I was a hero. Maybe I was. I don't know.   
  
From the time I was ten on, the war was a constant, irritating backdrop. Supply lines were cut, and rations were imposed. People wanted celebrations put down, because the districts had decided to start killing people. When they executed the Thirteen Traitors (or the Thirteen Martyrs, as the districts call them), I had to walk by the hanging bodies for three days to get to class. One of them was the sister of my old roommate. He went home the day after the hanging, and he was probably out in the field, shooting people, until the cease-fire.  
  
When I turned sixteen, they made me start teaching low level classes to pay my tuition, and I was teaching a class full of eight year olds the wonders of our civic system when the missiles hit. The first thing I remembered feeling was surprise. I knew they'd put us here as human shields, but I actually assumed we'd be pretty effective at it. Everyone knew that there was a school here. We were on television all the time. I never figured that they'd bomb us. But there it was: a thunderous boom, then chunks of the ceiling falling down, the walls cracking under the strain of the collapse above us.  
  
I took the kids with me because they were there, and it seemed like a good idea to get them out. It never occurred to me to just leave them. I wasn't afraid. I knew I wasn't going to die yet. Some of them, like little Ausonius Glass, have started calling me an angel and a hero, and I have a feeling that will be useful later, but at the time, no other course of action happened to occur to me.  
  
I hurried them downstairs ahead of the crushing sounds above us. We got as far as the lobby, and I realized that the main doors were blocked with rubble. I knew from planning the tournament that there was a media room off the lobby. Because of the electronics, it had a lot of extra steel bracing, and I was pretty sure there was a passage to the main news building next door. It was smoky by then, and Adamaris Brinn was crying and coughing. I wanted to hit her, but there wasn't time, so I just let her go on. We got into the media room just as the lobby collapsed. I did find the passage, but most of it had collapsed as well. I was still trying to dig our way out when a dark-haired girl in dirty district clothes pulled a beam away from me and pulled me up.  
  
I saw a camera. They were everywhere, but at that moment, one was trained on me and the girl. She held out her hand again to dust me off, and I knew what she meant: To make it look like they were being merciful and generous. The great, magnanimous victors. Of course we'd negotiate with them.  
  
I took her by the throat and told her that I didn't need saving.  
  
There were a lot of people in the Capitol who wanted someone to do exactly that -- to tell the districts exactly where they could put their peace overtures and demands for capitulation. They were tired of war and angry that it had been forced on them by people who, as far as they were concerned, they had never harmed. (Presumably, the districts saw things differently.) We had the guns and bombs. Why were we negotiating at all?  
  
So I became their face. It didn't convince Clemm to invite me to the meeting. He doesn't understand the Capitol all that well. But it will come in handy later.  
  
My dormitory room is under the rubble of the Green Tower somewhere, but I haven't had a problem finding a place to stay. The Kalers gave me a new computer. The Lights let me have the run of their store for new clothes, so I'm actually dressed better than I used to be. I can go into any of a dozen restaurants and cafes for free meals, though I only plan to take advantage of that until Clemm starts paying me for my idea. The Glass family actually runs a rooming house, and they gave me the best room in the place for saving their little darling.  
  
Said little darling, Ausonius, is sitting on the front steps when I come around the corner, and he jumps up, smiling. It's a strange expression, since he's got a shrapnel cut running from the bridge of his nose to his ear. It just missed his eye, and he looks weirdly stitched together. "Did you see the president?" he asks. "Did he see you? Did you say about the Games?"  
  
"Yes. To all three." I go up the stairs. There's a pile of dead bugs next to where Ausonius was sitting, several of them are burned up against the wall, apparently having been backed into the corner. A magnifying glass is dropped carelessly in the dust. "Science experiments?" I ask, though I know the answer. Ausonius's "science experiments" have led to a precipitous drop in the vermin population of the neighborhood, and the disgusting little brat just keeps doing them.  
  
He nods enthusiastically. "You have to burn all the way through the shell before they make sounds. Then they make this chittering sound like…" He clicks his tongue repeatedly, then smiles again. "You should see them squirm."  
  
As I just made the president of Panem squirm, I'm not all that concerned about green-striped beetles, but I make the right sounds. Ausonius is always deeply pleased when I praise him, and it's gotten me a good room at the moment.  
  
I unlock the door with the thumbprint pad and let myself in. Ausonius trails behind me, looking at my growing stash of belongings with admiration. He heads over to my window, where I've put a small rosebush that was given to me by the Strong family. Unlike most of the things I've acquired, I actually appreciate the rosebush. It lives in a deep pot that will let it grow for a while, and hopefully, by the time it outgrows its home, I'll have a nice salary and a house with a yard. I don't know why, exactly, it pleases me, but I spend a little time every night spritzing it and pruning it when it's necessary.  
  
Ausonius goes over to it and yanks on one of its leaves.  
  
I pinch his wrist and move his hand. "You wouldn't like it if someone pulled your fingers off, would you?"  
  
He shakes his head rapidly, staring up at me with fear. "No! No. I only wanted to see if the leaves were sharp."  
  
"The leaves aren't sharp. But wrap your hand around the stem and give it a squeeze."  
  
He actually does it. I see blood come out around his fist, but he doesn't cry out. "Sharp," he says.  
  
"Let go now."  
  
He lets go, like a robot with a new order. There are four puncture wounds in his hand, and they are bleeding brightly.  
  
I go to the bathroom and get the small medicine kit from under the sink. Everyone is supposed to have first aid supplies, in case of attack, but this one isn't exactly state of the art. It has a few bandages and an anti-bacterial ointment, though, which I bring out. I bandage up Ausonius's hand while he blinks at me reverently. When I finish, he holds up his hand, and I realize with a wave of revulsion that he expects me to kiss it. I don't indulge him. Instead, I stand up and turn on the television.  
  
Ausonius doesn't pout for long. After a few minutes, he comes over and perches on the back of the sofa behind me.  
  
"…and it is believed that this final stronghold in District Eleven is the last of the rebel holdouts," a reporter says, standing in front of a burning barn with a grim expression on her face. "Our nightmare is finally over."  
  
"I have nightmares," Ausonius says.  
  
"Everyone does," I assure him, though I can't think of any that I've had. As to the national nightmare, the news crews have declared it "over" at least six times since the bombing of District Thirteen, and everyone on the street still looks like they haven't been getting much sleep.  
  
"Once, there was a giant monster, and it was eating up the whole Capitol."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"But then you were there, and you told it that it had to leave us alone! And you made it blow itself up!"  
  
"How clever of me."  
  
"You went right up to it and kicked it in the face, then you strangled it."  
  
"Before or after it blew up?"  
  
"Before. After, it was just big gross globs of meat."  
  
"Did we make a barbeque of it?"  
  
"You can't eat a monster!"  
  
I shrug. "Why not? Meat's meat."  
  
On television, they're showing scenes from the war again. Mostly, it's the end of things. In Four, the people set the rebellion headquarters to the torch before the war even ended, and now, they're trying to convince everyone that the plan wasn't to do the same thing to the Panem building. In Eight, there's no such effort. They're just getting back to work, switching the textile factories to Capitol interests. In Twelve, they show an impossibly old-looking man being loaded onto a truck and taken into the city from the acres of farmland he let the rebellion use. The fields and his house are set to the flame. It's a big expanse of land.  
  
 _I can put new houses there,_ I think out of nowhere. _All that good land. It'll be for whoever wins the Games. They'll be rich. That will make them play harder. And everyone will hate them for using the old man's land, and think that they only killed other children to get rich._  
  
I'm not sure if it's a good idea yet, but I grab my notepad and scribble it down. It's better, after all, if people have a local target for any frustrations they may have. It will keep them out of the Capitol.  
  
"What's that?" Ausonius asks.  
  
"I just thought of a prize for the Games."  
  
"District people shouldn't get prizes," Ausonius said. "District people are bad."  
  
"The stupid ones won't play without a prize."  
  
He frowns. "Isn't it smart people who want a prize?"  
  
"No. Smart people play games to win them. Winning is the prize. Smart people play for the sake of playing. They play for the love of the game."  
  
"Even district people won't love it when they have to die."  
  
"The smart ones will think they can live. They'll play better. They'll love it. They'll hate themselves for loving it. And we won't have to worry about them doing anything else."  
  
Ausonius thinks about this. "Will the one that lives just keep playing every year until he dies?"  
  
I consider this closely. The notion of putting the winners in the games over and over hadn't really occurred to me before. It's worth thinking about, but I think it would be better if they move on, and play with the new contestants like chess pieces.  
  
It won't work at first. We'll have to get a good handful of winners before I can make that happen. But I store it away in my skull for future reference. Or maybe they can keep playing until they age out, and if anyone survives every year, _then_ he gets a house.  
  
I discard that idea. We'll need winners right away. The Capitol will grow bored with vengeance soon. If we don't hurry up the first Games, they'll be bored before we start. So we'll need to have winners with interesting stories as soon as possible. No waiting around for a series of tests. It'll have to be a single Games for each winner.  
  
"I think we'll just make them coaches," I tell Ausonius. "Like when I coached your baseball team after I did well playing."  
  
He nods wisely and presses at his bandage. A bloom of blood comes up and makes a pattern on the cloth.  
  
 _A house_ , I think. _And a chance at a higher level of game play. And money. There has to be money. Not a lump sum. A_ salary _, something that comes regularly, so they'll never burn out like the actors we sometimes see on television, who fritter away big contracts and are so flaky that they never get regular work again, and die penniless. No, our Games winners will always have money. No one else will. That will keep them as permanent local targets._  
  
It'll take some doing, but I think I can get people to fund a trust for it, if I can sell it right.  
  
The news ends, and I let Ausonius switch to a children's show. He keeps pressing blood spots into his bandages while an animated coyote sings a song about how the captain is a friend, and he'll protect you to the end, and an ear he'll always lend. It skips that your money, he'll always spend, and your sister's panties, he's likely to rend, but I've seen these guys in action, so I fill in the subtext on my own.  
  
Mrs. Glass comes to pick up Ausonius for supper and invites me, but I say no. I have work to do, and I'd rather be alone. I call one of the restaurants that gives me food and ask them to send over whatever their special is today, and I get my notes back out.  
  
My presentation from earlier was incomplete. There are so many more things I can do with the Games.  
  
I spend the next three days thinking of prizes and incentives, and different twists I can put on the rules when it's warranted. Every five years, maybe.  
  
No, ten. Maybe even twenty-five. I'll run out of ideas too quickly if it's only every five.  
  
I start making lists of what we'll need as time goes on. Most of it, I won't share right away. There's a lot of cost, and it will take some doing to secure the basics. No need to alarm the legislature just yet. If I know Clemm, he's planning to disband that body soon enough, anyway.  
  
The call comes in the next Wednesday morning, while I'm going through the motions of my physics class. My new school is a public monstrosity, and I did most of this work two years ago. A presidential guard arrives at school, and I'm escorted out of the classroom.  
  
The car he brings me to coasts through the less damaged streets, finally slowing down as we get to the unrepaired area near the Capitol buildings. The car dips into an underground parking structure, and then I'm led over to an elevator.  
  
Neither the guard nor the driver speaks to me through any of it.  
  
The elevator rises for what seems like a long time, and I'm not remotely surprised when the doors open and I find myself on the top floor of the Capitol's Panem Building, looking down over the city. I can see the lake and the bright white salt flats beyond it.  
  
Antonius Clemm is standing behind a large wooden desk, looking at the same view, until he hears us. He turns and waves off the guard.  
  
"But sir…" the guard says.  
  
"Oh, Coriolanus and I understand each other," Clemm says. "I'm in no danger right now. He has a long future in front of him, and he won't want it tainted with an unexplained assassination."  
  
With obvious misgivings, the guard goes back into the elevator.   
  
Clemm waits to see the numbers start to go down and says, with some admiration, "You really are a little psychopath, aren't you?"  
  
"That's never come up on my tests," I tell him.  
  
"Of course it has. No one told you, because it would hardly be useful information for you to have, but I assure you, until yesterday, your file was very clear on the subject."  
  
"And what happened yesterday?"  
  
"I decided to appoint you to my government. Welcome to your brand new office. Luckily, none of the people who did your tests are alive. The three who hadn't yet died in the war were in the Green Tower. You have the luck of the devil, you know."  
  
I don't answer.  
  
"At any rate," he says, "I decided it would be disadvantageous for my new Head Gamemaker to have that particular label. I removed it -- and all of the information pertinent to it -- before the file was reviewed. I didn't destroy it, though, and I highly recommend that you remember that I have it. It would be a shame if it were suddenly found."  
  
I don't complain about this. He probably considers it fair payback for my own leverage. It does seem like a fair enough rule. "So why did you put me in this office? Why not just steal my idea?"  
  
"Because I'm quite sure that you're refining it even as we speak, and will continue to work on it creatively. There's nothing you love more than the game, is there? Or anything else you love at all."  
  
I shrug. "So, they decided to go with it."  
  
"It took some doing."  
  
"And will the districts sign the treaty?"  
  
"I don't intend to give them much room to negotiate. They can agree to it, or they can be firebombed." He glances out the window, at a formation of hovercrafts coming in over the lake. "So, as far as I'm concerned, it's done."  
  
"Why did you do it?"  
  
"Because you're right about the image. And besides, how many other countries have managed to turn a profit on post war vengeance? Once we get this going, it will be a never-ending source of revenue. As a matter of fact, I want you to make it one of your first orders of business to insert revenue-generating aspects to the Games."  
  
"From the districts?"  
  
"Where would the districts get it? The districts will provide the players. But the money will almost certainly come from Capitolites. Get as much of it as you can."  
  
I nod. It hadn't occurred to me. I rarely think about money. But he's right. We make money from the Games, and then we plow it right back into the next Games. That will take care of my more outlandish ideas. I'll start with the donations to the winners' trust fund and get people invested with that. There can be betting and parties and sideshows. Maybe I'll think of a way to get them to just send in money directly to the Games. Nothing generates devotion to something quite like paying for it.  
  
Clemm looks at me with great, undisguised distaste. "You really are a monster, you know."  
  
"Then I should fit right in."  
  
He nods and goes to the elevator.  
  
I get to work before the doors even open.  
  
 ****

**The End**

 


	4. Snowmelt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I know I've kind of stepped away from HG fic (just ran out of stuff to say, I think), but I had this unfinished story about Peeta in the Capitol, between the end of the war and his return to Twelve. It was meant to be an appendix to The Narrow Path, but I couldn't seem to finish it then.
> 
> If you haven't read the rest of the series, the two stories this one references most are "House of Cards," which is the story of Peeta's imprisonment, and the second appendix on "The Golden Mean," a chapter called "Gramps," which gives an intro to the characters of Justinian and Aurelian Benz. (Both appear briefly elsewhere.)

**_March 1, 637 After Founding (Year 0 Panem Republic). Psychiatric transcription by Gavin Aurelius, subject Mellark. Private notes._** _  
P: Am I still a prisoner in the Capitol?  
A: Do you feel like a prisoner?  
P: You won't clear me to leave care. Or to try it remotely, like you're doing with Katniss.  
A: [laughter] I shouldn't have cleared it with Katniss. If they'd given me a choice in the matter, I wouldn't have. And if you _ do _go back, please tell her that I can't do her required therapy if she doesn't pick up the phone.  
P: She's not picking up?   
A: She's not. Is that significant to you?  
P: [pause] No. I guess not. She never paid much attention to it. Maybe she ripped it out like Haymitch did. Did you try calling Haymitch?  
A: Haymitch isn't a patient.  
P: He's Katniss's guardian.  
A: I'll consider it. But we're not here to talk about Katniss, Peeta. I shouldn't have allowed the conversation to go there. Have you thought about what we talked about? About staying here permanently, with your cousin and your grandfather?  
P: They're blood, but… they're not family. I like them, but they aren't really mine. My family…   
A: [long pause] Yes?  
P: My family is dead. Except for Katniss and Haymitch.  
A: Yes. [pause] Will you tell me about them?  
P: About Katniss and Haymitch?  
A: About your family, Peeta.  
[The subject shifts uneasily, avoiding the topic.]  
P: Not yet. Please. I can't talk about them yet. I don't really talk about them._

  
Snowmelt starts earlier in the Capitol than it does in District Twelve. By the middle of March, the snow is gone and flowers are starting to come up, more like the end of April at home. There's a constant sound of trickling water coming down from the mountains through the arroyos, and a smell in the air of fresh soil.  
  
It's not just the weather that's thawing, either. The schools are open. The university was largely destroyed, but professors have been holding small classes in their homes or, for art teachers, in any studio space they can find. There is quiet, almost awed, talk about opening the hiking trails on time, and maybe starting to fix up the ski slopes for next year. A ferry has been running steadily between the Capitol and District Three, over the cold waters of the lake, but now they're talking about fixing up any boats that weren't destroyed, and starting up pleasure cruises when it's really warm. The large amusement park that once stood on the lake shore was destroyed by the bombings, but people have started to build a few simple rides there again, and children are playing on re-built swing sets and slides. Construction crews are working on the larger projects, and the sounds of machinery and workers calling back and forth to each other are the constant soundtrack of the streets.  
  
The winter of the war is coming to an end.  
  
I breathe in deeply as I leave the little bakery where I've been spending most of my mornings and head for the bus stop. The job isn't a full time thing, or even a paid thing. I just smelled the cinnamon rolls one morning on my way home from art class, and I was completely swallowed by my memories. I collapsed onto the curb and started to cry. This hasn't been an unusual sight in the Capitol this year. For the first few weeks after Snow and Coin died, it was hard to go a block without seeing someone weeping inconsolably on a street corner, unsure of anything in the world. I'd comforted people before it happened to me, and I continued to do it pretty regularly until the shock finally tapered off.   
  
When I was the one on the curb, the person that came out was the baker, a wiry woman with almond-shaped eyes and glossy black hair. Her name is Annona Lee, and after she recognized me, she asked if I'd like to come in and help her knead the evening's loaves. I went with her. We've never had a long and meaningful conversation about this, or anything else, but every morning when I show up, she finds something for me to do. It feels good, and normal. She has a lot of recipes that I've never heard of, and to my surprise, it's mutual. Like any business people, we're leery of sharing secrets, but the subject of trading has come up. I won't give her any of Dad's recipes, but I trade her the cheese buns I developed for a really good steamed bun with barbecued pork.   
  
Katniss will like them.  
  
If I go back.  
  
I stop walking and take a few deep breaths. The idea that I might stay here, build my own bakery, go to the university, maybe even start dating again… it keeps coming up, like a little alien speaking in my head. Except that it's not. I've had alien things in my head. This isn't one of them. It's just disorienting. I still love Katniss. I always will. But so much has happened. Maybe too much. I always felt that, if I didn't make it work, I'd jitter apart at the seams, not knowing who I was. I wasn't lying when I told her on the beach that, without her, I had nothing. I'd have had the people I already had, but I wouldn't have had any _reason_ for my life.  
  
I'm just not sure that's true anymore. I want to be with her, and it will hurt if I've lost her, but there could be something on the other side. I would still be me.  
  
Is the me I am here the one who counts? I don't know. Every time I think, _I could make a life here_ , I remember her holding me tight and begging me not to let Snow take me away from her. I remember her kiss, when we came back up from the sewers after Finnick died. All of the false things rose up in my mind then, clamoring for my attention, but she didn't let me go. And I found some deep center of myself that was _me_ underneath them all. It was the first time in months that I'd really found something solid to hold on to, and I will always love her for knowing it was there, in spite of everything I'd done.  
  
But all of the false things are wrapped around her, too. Can I ever really sort out what's real if we're together? Dr. Aurelius thinks it's a bad idea for me to go back to her until I have a very firm grip on my own reality as a separate person. ”And, Peeta, you have to let that separate person become who he needs to be. Even if it's without her."  
  
I shake it off and start moving again, turning the corner to the bus stop. I could afford a car and Plutarch taught me to drive one day, but there's no point to it. The buses are running fine, and I don't mind walking the distance between stops. I even run a little bit now.  
  
"Morning, Peeta," the bus driver says when I board.  
  
"Hey, Portunes. Right on time."  
  
"Have to keep up my reputation." He nods toward the back. "Your cousin's been riding around waiting for you."  
  
I look up. Aurelian Benz waves to me awkwardly. My cousin. A quick genetic scan proved it, but I still have a hard time feeling him as family, and I think he feels the same. He suggested that I use his nickname, Aurrie, since his real name sounds too much like my doctor's, but it still feels forced, especially since there's only one other person in the world who calls him that.  
  
It's even worse with our shared grandfather Justinian, who I can't make myself call "Gramps," no matter how hard he tries. This may be because the first time I met him, Aurrie and I were bailing him out of the lower security wing of the same prison I spent weeks in as Snow's special guest. The usual city prisons were mostly destroyed during the war. I didn't mention that little excursion to Haymitch or Ruth. They were testy enough with Justinian already, without thinking he'd somehow "triggered" my bad dreams. I never needed any trigger for them then, and they weren't any worse after the trip than they were before it. The Peacekeepers from Thirteen had picked him up for running an illegal dice game in the park. ("At least they don't know the game," Aurrie said later on, as we sat on my apartment balcony, eating pasta and looking out over the lake at sunset. "So they missed that the dice were loaded.")   
  
I didn't know he was my grandfather before we left that day. I just went along because Aurrie was mortified to have been called away from a refugee charity center for business like that, and I wanted him to know that no one hated him. Also, because I doubted he had taxi fare, and the buses don't run all the way out to that prison. He was looking away, brick red, for half the trip, then he said, "Peeta, there's something you should probably know about Gramps."  
  
In the month since then, Justinian has told me his stories, and I've told him mine (from a distance; I can't seem to talk about them up close). He doesn't remind me of Mom at all, and is heartbroken to learn about her less than kind streak. I like him, though. He's a nice old man, in his way. He reminds me a little bit of Ed, I guess: physically imposing, a little touchy, but trying to muddle through a sense of "being good" that doesn’t always come naturally to him. He's trying to straighten out, working for the government to help them spot other old cons, but Aurrie has warned me not to get my hopes up.  
  
I pass a few of the other morning regulars and we smile at each other, but no one says anything. I finally reach Aurrie and sit down beside him. "You could just come into Annona's place," I say. "You don't have to just ride the bus until I get on."  
  
"I don't have money for baked goods."  
  
"You can just say you're coming to meet me. It's okay."  
  
"I might have, um… stolen some food from her once. When I was ten."  
  
I roll my eyes. "I'll smooth it over. What's going on? Is… is he in jail again?"  
  
"Nah. He's still being a good boy. I was just wondering… never mind."  
  
"What?"  
  
He closes his eyes. "Can I crash at your place? My landlord decided that there were too many of us living in that attic."  
  
"There are lots of apartments…"  
  
"I can't even afford the cheap ones, and I don't want to live with Gramps. He's just got one room. Tazzy said I could stay over at their place, but that's… awkward. She dumped me. I mean, she's not mad, but it's weird."  
  
"She dumped you?"  
  
He holds his hands up helplessly. "The accusation was along the lines of me thinking she's doing very well, for an ex-prostitute."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Beats me. I think she's embarrassed that I know how she used to make a living. I'd think that would be one awkward thing out of the way." He sighs. "What do I know?"  
  
I smile. "Well, you know you've got a cousin with an apartment that has an extra room. That's a start."  
  
"Thanks. It'll just be until I find some job that pays better than sweeping the restaurant."  
  
"You can have the place if I go back to Twelve."  
  
"You don't need to give me stuff."  
  
"I don't need to sell it, either, and it's already paid for." I shrug. "Come on. I don't feel like I earned what they pay me as a victor. Let me spend it, at least."  
  
"I think you earned it a few times over."  
  
I don't argue. It's kind of pointless. Other people have long since decided that they know what I deserve and don't deserve. They don't all agree about it, which is one of the reasons I keep a low profile. I save more than half of each month's salary, in case the government abruptly decides I need to start paying it back.  
  
The bus glides around the corner and into my neighborhood. It's neither the candy-colored lakeside neighborhood where Effie lives nor the foothills where houses like Gale's Capitol place command stunning views across the city. It's not far from the neighborhood Haymitch calls the Grove, the place he brought me when I was injured. I visit with our old sponsors as often as I can. They're nice ladies, and they seem to appreciate a friendly face now and then. I repainted the portraits of Miss Buttery's ancestors that the soldiers destroyed, and I plan to make one of her as well.  
  
I don't sleep much.  
  
My apartment is the top two floors of a narrow stone building that looks out on a well-tended Capitol park. Beetee says it's the park where he and Haymitch and Chaff used to play chess with the little old men, who've come tentatively back out to feed the birds. The bus pauses at a stop light near a group of them, and one recognizes me and waves. I wave back before it moves on to my actual stop. Aurrie and I get off, passing a few words with Portunes on the way. As the bus moves on, we go up the steps, and I thumb the lock pad. The door opens. We take the small, gilt elevator upstairs.  
  
"Where's your stuff?" I ask Aurrie as we go into the apartment. The entrance way goes up both stories to a skylight, and it's actually very pleasant.  
  
"It's at Gramps's place. Is it okay for him to bring it over later?"  
  
I roll my eyes. "As of ten minutes ago, you live here. You don't need to ask."  
  
He goes to the phone and calls our grandfather, and I make lunch for all three of us. I put on a potato based soup I made to simmer and put a fresh loaf of bread in the oven. It was rising while I worked this morning. I was afraid it might have been out too long. I've gotten a few loaves wrong at this altitude. But from the look of this one, it should be fine. When I get it baking, I go back out to the entryway. Aurrie is looking around at my canvases from class, limping from one to another. (He's joked that he's still just a wannabe, even mimicking my limp, but the truth is, I've adjusted to my artificial leg better than he's adjusted to his injured one.)  
  
"What are you going to paint next?" he asks me.  
  
"I don't know," I say. "My professor made me scrape my last canvas. He says I'm still doing figurative art."  
  
"Meaning…?"  
  
"Meaning he thinks I'm trying to hide portraits and illustrations in my abstracts."  
  
"And that's bad because…?"  
  
I shrug. "He's not a snob about it. He just thinks I already know that kind of painting, and he wants me to stretch and do something different, so I have some new tools. It's not a bad thing."  
  
"Oh."  
  
I can't think of anything else to say, so I fall back on the old standby: School. "What have you got going on in class?"  
  
"I have to do a presentation on the detonation of nuclear devices in the upper atmosphere."  
  
"Why did _anybody_ think that was a good idea?"  
  
"To keep the bombs from landing on cities," he says. "They were detonated before they hit their targets. They decided to risk likely damage to the atmosphere to avoid definite destruction on the ground. A couple of countries just kept doing it over and over. The weird part is, the bombs weren't even flying at them. They were trying to stop them from hitting _other_ people."  
  
"So… if someone aimed a gun at you and I knocked it away, you'd think I was weird?"  
  
"That's pretty much why everyone _does_ think you're weird."  
  
"As opposed to you, of course." I grin. "You'd just pretend to be a target and try to get them to shoot you instead."  
  
"And then I'd get Haymitch to lie and say I was really dead. Again."  
  
I laugh a little bit, though it's still kind of a ghost-house in my head. While we were making our way across town to kill Snow, we saw the report of Aurrie's "death" on television. I recognized him, and I knew he'd done it deliberately to distract people from where I really was, and I felt terrible about it. I only found out later that he was alive. The rebellion managed to pull that lie off pretty well. It was Haymitch's doing, like most of the things that actually worked properly. He wanted to make the mobs in the Capitol realize how far overboard they had gone, and they did. By the time we were making the final push through the city, not one person came after me at all, even though I'm pretty sure I was recognized a few times. One kid about my age asked if I needed a place to hide. I didn't take him up on it, of course. I decided that, if I couldn't be a martyr as a distraction for Katniss's scheme, maybe I could find a soldier to shoot at me near the mansion.  
  
I try now to remember how that felt, the desire to _cease to be_ , but I can't bring it back in any more than an academic way. I'd finally found myself again, and I was deeply ashamed at everything I'd done. I was afraid that the hijacking would never go away, and I might hurt Katniss, so it would be better for me to die. But almost dying seems to have cured me entirely, not of the false memories, but of any desire to give in to them.   
  
_And maybe you can do something other than be a martyr for Katniss._  
  
The thought comes again, in one of its many forms. Do I want to stay here? Do I want to try a life not tied to hers?  
  
Dr. Aurelius thinks I need to, if I'm really going to find myself. He told me to start dating again. There's a girl from District Three in my art class, the daughter of a sound engineer who moved here after the war. She's very beautiful. Her name is Wenna, and we've laughed about some of the more ridiculous propaganda art that our professor has shown us. She's made it clear that she's interested in me, and she knows more about paintbrushes than she does about the Hunger Games.   
  
_It would be a relief. Just do it._  
  
"Peeta?"  
  
I look up. Aurrie is watching me with some concern, and I realize that I'm leaning forward, holding onto the back of a chair. I don't know how long I've been like this. "Sorry," I say.  
  
"I didn't mean to…"  
  
I wave it off. "Don't worry about it."  
  
Justinian arrives a few minutes later, and we all have a pleasant enough lunch together. It's hard to think of these two people being related to Mom. It would be easier to believe it if they were related to Dad.  
  
After lunch, Justinian goes home, and Aurrie gets to work on his presentation about nukes. It's due on Monday, and he's only got the paper part of it done. There was a good computer terminal in this apartment when I bought it and I get him settled on it to work on his visual aids, then I get started on my painting for the afternoon. I can't think of anything abstract for class, so I work on my portrait of Miss Buttery. It's sketched out by the time I lose the natural light. I have decent full-spectrum artificial lighting here (I plan to install it in my studio in Twelve… if I go back), but it seems like as good a time as any to set it aside.   
  
The first episode of the re-created soap opera, _Seagull Point_ , is on tonight. It opens up in the same big mansion where it was centered while Snow was in charge, and Valerian Vale's character is standing with his back to the camera, looking out over the city. A portrait of Mimi Meadowbrook's character hangs beside him. I painted it from his old pictures, and from watching two seasons during sleepless nights last month. He was a sponsor. It seemed like the least I could do. Another one of the old characters is talking in the background.  
  
"I just don't understand how anything works anymore, Caius," he says. "All the rules are different. All the things we knew are gone. Everything's changed."  
  
Valerian turns to the camera, eyes twinkling, and says, "Maybe not _everything._ "  
  
He grins broadly, and the credits come up. They look remarkably similar to the old credits, though there are now a great many shots of vans bringing in furniture as the new, presumably district-native characters move into their upscale Capitol homes. These are mixed in with the usual shots of the skyline, the lake, and characters taking their clothes off.  
  
Aurrie comes out, and after the show, we talk about what _should_ be on. He wants science fiction. I want sports.  
  
"You do?" he asks. "I mean… I wouldn't think you'd want games."  
  
"I mean real sports. The kind where there's a silver medal. And a bronze one."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You know, the kind where people who don't win get to go home and try again next year."  
  
"Imagine that."  
  
We continue in this vein for a while, trying to figure out what kind of sports would work, and how to set them up when so many of the districts are smashed to rubble. Neither one of us points it out, but I think we both know that if Plutarch hasn't come up with some fairly large spectacle by summer, people will start feeling antsy without the Games.  
  
Aurelian goes to bed a little after midnight. I try to, but I toss and turn for forty minutes and end up back in my studio. I fall asleep at some point in the small hours, but I'm up around dawn, as always. Annona will expect me at work.

  
**_March 8, 637 After Founding (Year 0 Panem Republic). Psychiatric transcription by Gavin Aurelius, subject Mellark. Private notes._** _  
A: You haven't been sleeping.  
P: Sure I have. I'd be dead if I weren't sleeping.  
A: You're not sleeping _ enough _. You're taking art history and technique classes. You're working at the bakery. You're visiting old women. You're still working with the refugees. Most of them have found places. The orphanage is really just an orphanage now. They've found all the families that are going to be found.  
P: I'm just keeping busy. Have you talked to Katniss?  
A: No. But if I had, I couldn't tell you about it, any more than I could tell her about your sessions. Have you called her?  
P: I got through to Greasy Sae. She says Katniss is still feeling poorly. In Twelve, that could mean anything from a bad cold to… to what she was before she left. We don't really get into a lot of detail about things like that.  
A: But you did try.  
P: I tried. I want to see her.  
A: How are the nightmares?  
P: If I have them, I don't remember.  
A: Is that why you're not sleeping?  
P: It's pretty effective for that.  
A: What were you dreaming about when you decided to stop dreaming?  
P: I didn't decide. I just stopped. [pause] Okay, I was dreaming about prison. About what happened there. Not on my top ten list of happy memories. I think I'd rather remember the arena. At least I sometimes got kissed there. Not that I wanted anyone in the prison to kiss me. That would have been strange. [subject grins]  
A: I've told you before, you're not here to entertain me. Stop joking.  
P: But I always entertain people. Didn't you say you wanted me to be myself?  
A: And that's something that's real to you?  
P: What, making people happy? Yeah. I like doing that.  
A: Even at the cost of your own happiness?  
P: [pause] It's not a zero sum game. It's not like I make someone else smile by chopping off parts of myself and handing it to them. It makes me happier, too. I mean, what does it really cost me to be nice to people? What does it cost anyone? Wouldn't everyone be happier if we just…  
A: Just what?  
P: Just… moved on?_

  
"You're still telling stories, Peeta," Pacuvius Henry says. "Using a one-to-one symbol for your characters doesn't change that."  
  
I sigh and look at my canvas, which is a mess. The other three students in the class are working in somber tone fields, while my painting is a mishmash of reds and greens and blues and a splash of yellow that doesn't belong there at all. I've been trying very hard not to paint figures, just shapes and colors and feelings, but I keep finding forms anyway, then trying to hide them under meaningless smears. "Sorry," I say. "I'm not getting this."  
  
Pacuvius inspects the canvas. "No. You're not. It's all right. There's nothing shameful in illustration. It's simply not the subject of this class."  
  
"You don't like it, though."  
  
"No. I was forced to be an illustrator when I wished to be a fine artist. My sort of art was only appreciated in the underground, and when I tried to introduce it…" He shrugs. "Well, I wasn't punished, but I was also not making a living, and I was sneered at. I don't intend to sneer at you for the opposite. But I wonder, Peeta… are you an artist who happens to tell stories, or a storyteller who is also a skilled painter?"  
  
"I don't know." I scrape the canvas down slowly. "I wanted to learn this. I wanted to learn to understand it."  
  
"You can understand it without it becoming your native artistic tongue." He shakes his head. "Paint as you will," he says. "I am capable of teaching an illustrator, and you are capable of adapting the lessons of one form to another. Abstraction will give you tools to express the non-photographic elements of illustration, but it's useless to pretend to be an artist other than the one you are. Paint what you need to paint, boy."  
  
He walks away. From the next easel over, Wenna Liang gives me a sympathetic smile. Her painting is shades of brown with the slightest hint of red. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel from it, but the sense it gives me is being in a warm, comforting study.  
  
I can't think of anything else to paint, so I take out my charcoal and sketchpad and sketch a picture of her at her easel. I tear it off and give it to her at the end of class. It's not great work, and she knows it. She smiles. "It's not exactly painting practice."  
  
"Let me take a picture," I say. "I'll paint him a close-up of your left eye. I'll get every color."  
  
"Don't forget to put an abstraction in my pupil," she tells me, packing up her oils in an old leather briefcase. "Some inscrutable symbol of the deep confusion I arouse in you."  
  
"Confusion... Is _that_ what's aroused?"  
  
"Don't tease."  
  
"I'm not. Not much, anyway." I tuck my sketchpad under my arm and we walk out into the darkened halls of the National Art Museum together. Pacuvius's studio space is a gallery that was between shows when the bombs started falling, and never filled up again. Our class ends after the museum's work day, and the night shift guards look at us suspiciously as we make our way to the doors.   
  
Wenna moves closer to me. "I keep expecting them to search us every time we leave," she says.  
  
"What's it about, anyway?"  
  
"About a third of the collection got trashed in the war. Some pretty important stuff, too. Things they brought over from European and Asian museums in the Ingathering. A few from the coasts. Pre-catastrophe stuff."  
  
"And they blame district people for the war and…"  
  
"…and we're district people, so maybe we're out to wreck the rest of it." Wenna rolls her eyes. "Like I, personally, wanted to trash the terracotta warrior. I'd just as soon wring the neck of whoever dropped that bomb. It was probably a sculpture of one of my ancestors."  
  
"Whoever it was probably didn't know he was bombing ancient art."  
  
"Or care." We get outside and discover it's raining. I take her portfolio and she gets out her red umbrella, and we both huddle under it to awkwardly run to the sheltered bus stop. When we get there, we separate, and she delicately shakes the water off of the umbrella. "That's the real problem," she says, like there was no break. "It's bad that they accidentally bombed a statue. But they didn't care. It might not have been statues, and it wouldn't have made any difference. I heard they might have even done it deliberately at City Center."  
  
An image of Prim Everdeen comes into my head, and I feel sick. I sit down on the little metal bench and try not to look ill, but Wenna spots it. She sits beside me, looking concerned. I put up my hand before she can put hers on the back of my neck. "I'm okay," I say.  
  
"I forgot that's where you got hurt."  
  
"I did, too. That wasn't what I was thinking about. I lost someone there. Primrose Everdeen. Katniss's sister."  
  
"I don't think I've ever heard you say her name."  
  
"Prim's?"  
  
"Katniss's. I mean, except on television." She looks across the street at the dusky sunset. There's still so much dust in the air from the wartime explosions that the view is spectacular. "I wondered if…" She shrugs. "Nothing."  
  
I know the question she has decided not to ask -- she wonders if it was all a fake, because I haven't spent my time in art class painting Katniss or talking about her or crying over our separation -- but I decide to leave it alone. It's not her business.  
  
We board the bus together when it arrives a minute later, but she gets off in the government district to change routes, and I take it up to the fashion district.   
  
There's not good bus service to Effie's, so I pick up a taxi at the stand in front of Clothiers' Hall, the auditorium where the designers put on their shows. I could have picked one up in the government district, but the conversation with Wenna had gone far enough.  
  
I check in with Effie every week after this class. It's a ritual that keeps both of us grounded. She tells me whatever she's managed to pry out of Haymitch on the phone. It's never much. Effie's convinced that he's holed up in his house and not actually talking to anyone, no matter what he says, and I'm fairly sure she's right. I tell her that I'm fine, getting stronger, and generally in good spirits. It doesn't really matter what we say to each other. The point is just seeing each other and remembering that neither one of us is really alone, and that there are two other people out there who matter to us and aren't with us. I invited Aurrie to come along, since he adores Effie, but he's still afraid that he'll run into Tazzy, since she lives in the adjoining apartment.  
  
It's not a fancy gathering, or even a planned one, which is why I'm taken completely by surprise when I spot Gale Hawthorne sitting on the steps of Effie's building. Generally speaking, it takes a lot of planning to see Gale anywhere.  
  
He's been doing something with a handheld device, but he turns it off when he hears the cab door open. He stands up, looking about as surprised as I must. "Hey," he says.  
  
I nod. "Hey."  
  
"I didn't know you were coming over."  
  
"I didn't know you were in town."  
  
We look at each other awkwardly. Gale has had me over at his house, and he even helped me move into my apartment, when I bought some new furniture. Of course, we had our little jaunt through the Capitol sewers together. We had a very serious talk about him doing an "I choose to be free" propo, and I think we respect each other.  
  
But the fact is, the only thing we have in common that matters isn't exactly a comfortable topic of conversation. We never seem to know what to do with each other.  
  
"I'm just in for two days," he says. "A quick check in with Paylor about things in Two, and a report to the Council. Jo wanted to visit Effie. They're upstairs shopping."  
  
"Jo's with you?"  
  
He blushes. "Well. Yes. She's, um. Well, she's… I gave her a job in Two. She's bored. Enobaria's letting her use her house. Jo's place got wrecked during the war. And I guess Enobaria decided to stay here?"  
  
I nod and come up the stairs, leaning against the rail across from him. "Eno's been hanging around with people who want to start another district. I've seen her a few times. She didn't mention giving her house to Jo."  
  
"I thought they hated each other," Gale says.  
  
"Nah. Victors. They're weird." I smile, and he makes an attempt at returning it, but doesn't do very well.  
  
We're quiet for a while, and I feel like we should go in and go up to Effie's apartment, then Gale says, "Have you heard from Twelve lately?"  
  
I don't pretend not to know what the question really is. "Twelve hasn't been picking up her phone," I tell him. "I'm actually kind of worried about Twelve."  
  
"When are you going back?"  
  
"I haven't got the all-clear yet. I might not be safe."  
  
"You might not be. I'm definitely not. So neither of us can help her."  
  
"I'm not sure we could help her if we were right there."  
  
Beside my head, the speaker buzzes. "Come on, Gale," Jo says. "We're done talking clothes, so you can no longer be infected by discussion of sequins. You can come up now if you think you can handle being in the same room as a pink rug, oh you manliest of all male, manly men."  
  
"Buzz us up, Jo," I say.  
  
"Oh, Peeta!" Effie calls in the background. "Is it already that late?" A tone sounds, and the door's magnetic lock lets up.  
  
Gale and I go inside and take the elevator upstairs without speaking to each other.  
  
When the doors open, Effie runs over and gives me a hug. She makes a move toward Gale, but stops when she spots that he's bracing for it the way he might brace for a blow. She loops her arm through mine and says, "I didn't know Johanna and Gale were going to be in town today. I'd have let you know ahead of time.  
  
Jo waves from where she's sitting, near Effie's comm station. "I wouldn't have. It was much more amusing for you two to run into each other without expecting it."  
  
"Thanks, Jo," I say. "You're always so considerate and helpful."  
  
"Well one of us has to be, and you're such a pill."  
  
"Johanna!" Effie scolds, rolling her eyes in an exasperated way. " _Really._."  
  
"I'm ordering in," Jo says. "Have you tried that new restaurant in the Scar?"  
  
The Scar is the part of the Capitol's business district that was leveled in the war. The surrounding buildings have been shored up, even made almost fashionable, by businesspeople moving into town after the war. I haven't been there much, mostly because the people setting up there are people who want to seem chic, who spend their days complaining about how gauche their home districts are, and how they're so glad to be somewhere cosmopolitan, now that they have the freedom to move around.   
  
They remind me of my mother.  
  
I see her hand in my head, beckoning from its vat, her ring melted across her fingers.  
  
"Haven't been," I mutter.  
  
"It's a guy from District Ten," Jo goes on, oblivious. "Some relative of Toffy Taggart's, I think. Barbecue joint, but he ended up marrying a girl from Four during the war, so also, fish. Done barbecue style, with all the trimmings." She starts typing.  
  
"I have no idea what she's talking about," Gale whispers, and I glance over to see that he actually looks sheepish and embarrassed. He shrugs. "I just go with it."  
  
I laugh, pushing away the odd, random thought of my mother. "Probably a good idea. And I don't know, either. It's not like I ever had a chance to hit the Capitol restaurants. Even now, I mostly don't."  
  
"Where _do_ you eat?" Jo asks.  
  
"At home. I cook. After shopping. In grocery stores. Have you ever seen one? Very exotic."  
  
She makes a rude gesture at me.  
  
It strikes me that a lot of the victors might _not_ be particularly familiar with grocery stores or cooking. Most would have come from poor backgrounds, where hunting, begging, and picking up grain from the tessera office would have been the major modes of picking up food, and later, a lot was just ordered and shipped to their doorsteps. Haymitch avoided the grocery store in Twelve. My father told me once, when I asked why Haymitch hardly ever came into town even to shop, that one of the grocers' kids was a tribute who died in the arena, and the other one died of a sickness, and somehow Haymitch had worked that around to the whole family hating him and him being ashamed to walk into the store.  
  
"Then why doesn't he come _here_ anymore?" I asked, pointing around the bakery.  
  
Dad rolled his eyes and said, "Because he won't go where I won't let him drink. Damned idiot."  
  
I was maybe seven then, but even then, I knew that my father drank sometimes… and sometimes it was way too much. I also knew that my mother hated everyone, but Haymitch more than anyone other than Mrs. Everdeen, so she wouldn't exactly be happy to see him.  
  
Gale's hand falls on my shoulder, but before he can express concern, I just shake my head and wave it off.  
  
The food comes half an hour later, and it's very good. We all sit in the living room, watching television for a while. Effie has talked to Haymitch, and, while she doesn't mention it, I know she thinks he's been drinking again, which is a surprise to absolutely no one.  
  
"What's happening in town?" Gale asks. "Does he know?"  
  
"He says there are more people coming in all the time."  
  
"What about Katniss?" Jo prods.  
  
Effie shakes her head. "He hasn't said much. I think she hasn't been talking to him."  
  
"Someone needs to go out there," Gale says.  
  
"I wish I could," Effie says wistfully. "I really do. Haymitch asked me to go with him. But there's so much _work_ to do!"  
  
"Me, too," Gale mutters.  
  
"I'm not allowed yet," I say.  
  
"Well, that leaves me!" Jo gives a big fake smile. "I'll just go out there and use the power of positive dialogue and sympathy to put our little Humpty Dumptys back together again. I mean, who's better at being kind and sympathetic?"  
  
"I don't know," I say. "Did they keep any of those orange monkeys from the arena?"  
  
She flicks a finger full of coleslaw at me, and I toss a roll in her direction.  
  
Effie despairs of us. Jo and Gale leave an hour later. I stay to help her clean up. She asks me how I'm feeling. I tell her that I'm fine.  
  
"Are you sleeping?" she asks. "You don't look like you're getting enough sleep."  
  
"Effie, I'm fine."  
  
She sniffs. "Haymitch says he's fine, too. And sober."  
  
"Okay, I'm not fine yet, but… I'm all right."  
  
She accepts this.  
  
I go home. Aurrie and Justinian are both up waiting for me, and I play a few hands of poker with them, which is something like playing with my brothers… not a one of us has a good hand, but we bluff the bets up into the stratosphere, since we're playing with fake money. After a while, Justinian goes home and Aurrie goes to bed. I stay up in my studio, painting portraits and listening to the rain as it washes the winter out through the gutters.  
  
It's still raining when I fall asleep at last and dream of my brothers in the kitchen, stirring bowls of ashes.  
  
I don't think the rain has even paused when I wake up before dawn.

 

 

 ** _March 15, 637 After Founding [Year 0 Panem Republic]. Psychiatric transcription by Gavin Aurelius, subject Mellark. Private notes._** _  
P: What are you waiting for, anyway?  
A: What do you mean?  
P: I mean, if I had a broken leg, you'd be testing it to see if I could walk again. If I got flash-blinded, you'd want to know when I could see. What am I looking for here? How do I know when I'm safe?  
A: Do you feel safe?  
P: That's not what I mean. You know that's not what I mean. I mean, when other people are safe _ around _me. Isn't that why you're not letting me go back?  
A: No.  
P: [pause] Then what's the point? Why am I still here?  
A: Listen to your own questions, Peeta. What's the point? Why are you here? Are you safe? Which of those questions is the most important to you?  
P: I wasn't asking those questions. Not the way you make it sound.  
A: How do I make it sound?  
P: Like I’m… gazing at my navel and trying to figure out the meaning of life or something.  
A: And you don't think you are? Or you think you shouldn't be?  
[subject does not answer for several seconds]  
A: Peeta?  
P: I don't want to. [shrugs] I mean… what if it doesn't mean anything at all? What if you just end up…  
A: Peeta? Peeta?  
P: It's time to go. I have class.  
[subject leaves without dismissal]_

  
I don't know what I was thinking, agreeing to go on a hike with Enobaria Fells.  
  
She has no patience with my limp, and it's not like we've really enjoyed each other's company in the past. But she called, and here I am, lurching my way up a path into the foothills, watching her disappear ahead of me.  
  
She said she wanted to talk about something, but so far, all she's said is, "Did you bring water?"  
  
I power along, ignoring the chafing where the robotic prosthetic leg rubs up against the stump of my real one. There's no way to avoid it, I guess. Everything's wired up to my nerves, and it works really well. I know how to take care of the circuitry, and the damage my jailors did to it has been well-repaired. But the fact is, a foreign object has been grafted onto my body, and where it meets the organic material, it's always going to chafe a little. I'll put medicine on it tonight, and it will be all right in the morning. At the moment, it's a low-grade annoyance.  
  
There's a steep and uneven part of the path ahead, and I see Enobaria sitting on a rock just beyond it, staring out over the Capitol.  
  
It's a little muddy and slippery, but I can also see the spring flowers poking through.  
  
Forget-me-nots.  
  
They're blue. Forget-me-nots are blue. For some reason, I think, _I need to tell Johanna._  
  
It must have come up in prison, that's the only reason I can think of that I'd associate them with Johanna, but I can't remember why it seems important.  
  
I tip and sway most of the way up the path, and I end up grabbing at rocks to keep from falling over, but I do make it.   
  
Enobaria looks over her shoulder, unconcerned. "It's a good view from up here."  
  
I take it in. The city, spilling down the foothills toward the lake, like a forest of bright spun-sugar candy. The lake, glimmering in the sun. The punishing desert on the far shore, stretching away toward District Three.  
  
"Yeah," I say. "It's great." I sit down beside her.  
  
"It's not so different from District Two out here," she says. "We're just the other side of the mountains. My brother and I used to hike around all the time. He was a Peacekeeper. He died when your friends pulled you and Mason and Cresta out of the prison. He was one of the guards." She looks at me. "Not one of the ones playing games with you. He told me. He was worried that I'd end up in there, too, if I ever let my loyalist image waver."  
  
I move away a little bit, thinking that being on a high ledge with a victor who might well blame me for her brother's death might not be the best idea. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."  
  
She waves it off. "Don't get the wrong idea. He wasn't defending the prison. He let Hawthorne in. He wasn't supposed to die, of course, but someone somewhere screwed up. It may even have been Janus himself. He was a good boy, but he'd have never made it through the arena. Prone to very preventable mistakes."  
  
She says this in a cool, philosophical tone, and I know I'm not meant to pry, so I say, "Oh."  
  
"I know they put Brutus in there with you. Other bodies, too. I don't know who they were. Jan said they were brought from Twelve."  
  
I am suddenly back in my cell. Snow puts down a box, too large to be a body part like the ones he's put on my shelves -- my mother's hand, my father's jaw, my brother's foot -- but too small to be a grown person. My niece. He says she'll be back in there with me if I lie to him and…  
  
I jab my finger into the seam of my prosthetic and bring myself back to the present.  
  
Enobaria is looking at me with curious disgust. "Does that serve some purpose?"  
  
"Grounding."  
  
She nods. No nonsense about not understanding. "I guess Brutus was there to make you feel like a murderer, right? Convince you that you weren't some big white knight because you killed him?"  
  
I look away. "Something like that."  
  
"Snow. Goddamned Snow." She shakes her head. "With Finnick and me, and Gloss and Cashmere and a few others, he sold us to the highest bidders, then tried to convince us we were whores. Bastard. It's the same thing. He stuck you in a kill or be killed situation, then tried to make you feel like a killer."  
  
"Is that what you wanted to tell me?"  
  
"No. You're not dumb enough not to know that. It's not very subtle."  
  
"Then what?"  
  
"Brutus didn't really have anyone, so I decided to get his body and send it home, if Snow hadn't burned him."  
  
My stomach does a kind of looping drop inside me. "And you found it."  
  
"I found it. And the others. Some… parts. And a man and a woman and a baby."  
  
I can't speak.  
  
She looks at me. "They're your people, aren't they?"  
  
I make a few odd motions with my mouth, but I don't think anything comes out. Enobaria waits without any readable expression.  
  
"I'll take that as a yes," she finally says. "There's a mortuary there in the prison. That's where they were, if you want to do something with them."  
  
"I…" I manage. "Thank you, Eno." The words sound thin and listless.  
  
"Yeah, the gratitude is overwhelming. I can imagine just how happy it must make you." She glares out across the city, then pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. She holds it out to me, but I shake my head. I don't like the smell. She shrugs and takes a drag, letting the smoke spill out of her mouth, making a thin curtain between herself and the view. "I shouldn't do this up here. But it hasn't been dry lately. Everything's wet up here. I don't see a fire danger, and I'll put the damned thing out for good before we go. Stomping them is half the fun of smoking."  
  
I don't know what I’m supposed to say to that, so I give her a noncommittal sound, something like, "Uhn."  
  
She smokes quietly for a few minutes, then sighs, letting out a cloud of the stuff. "I'm sticking here until Paylor gives the go ahead to start the new district. We have everything lined up, you know. Ready to go. It's just a question of fighting it out with people who don't think we can afford to split off part of the population right now. I'd be sympathetic, if it were in my nature, but it's not. I want to get out of here. The islands sound just about right to me. Lots and lots of water between me and the rest of goddamned Panem."  
  
"Islands?"  
  
She nods. "It's the farmers from Eleven that got it going. They want to grow sugar cane. I don't know why, but I like the idea of sweating things out and hacking away the cane. It feels… _real_. Maybe you can buy some of it for baking. You… it _is_ baking you do, right? Or was that someone else?"  
  
"It was me," I say. I feel like I should contribute something more to the conversation, so I add, "I'm still doing it. Working in a bakery, I mean."  
  
She nods. "I always thought the most damnable thing they did to all of us was not letting us work. It was supposed to be some great treat. I don't know about you, but half the time, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to get up in the morning _for._ "  
  
"Habit?" I suggest.  
  
" _There's_ a compelling reason to live." Enobaria falls silent again for a while, and I don't speak into it. I doubt she brought me up here just to tell me where to find the bodies. She could have done that with a phone call. Finally, she stubs out her cigarette and grinds it into the wet mud. She stands up. "Are you going back to Twelve?"  
  
The question surprises me. I don't know why. It just comes out of nowhere. "I'm not cleared."  
  
"Not cleared to leave the Capitol or not cleared to go to Twelve?"  
  
"What's the difference?"  
  
She smiles wearily. "About twelve districts. Thirteen, if you we get the go ahead for Fourteen. You could go build a bakery in Four or… I don't know."  
  
"Why do you care about that?"  
  
"You're one of us. I saw Johanna when she came. Some last trading stuff about my house in Two. Well, _her_ house in Two. She said you were running around the Capitol like a drunken woodchuck --"  
  
" _What?_ "  
  
"It's what she says when she means running around in circles. Pointless running around." She shrugs. "I don't know. You seem normal to me, but I don't know you."  
  
"Jo… wanted you to… what, babysit me?"  
  
She thinks about this. "I think she's mostly worried about the girl. Not that she _says_ so. What she says is that Katniss is probably moping around while you're gadflying here, and you don't seem to know what to do with yourself."  
  
"Thanks," I mutter. "You're full of great nuggets. Jo thinks I'm being delinquent, my family's dead, Haymitch is drinking again, Effie's lonely --"  
  
"Hey, don't lay those last two on me.  I didn't bring those up. Are you actually laying Haymitch Abernathy drinking on yourself?"  
  
"No," I say.   
  
"And you better not start." She turn around, looking me full in the face for the first time. I can see some unevenness where her pointed teeth press against her lips. "I don't care all that much," she says. "But it doesn't look like anyone is talking sense to you. Running around and doing everything there is to do is fine for a little while, but you've got to decide what you want in the end. Are you going to be a Capitol boy? Or are you going to get out of here? Are you going to be what you were, or are you going to become something else? Because you're running out of time. The Capitol will hold onto you for as long as it can… preferably until it turns you into one of its own. But you have other places to go. You can come down to the islands with us crazy people if you want to."  
  
"Thanks, but --"  
  
She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. "You can, but I wasn't serious. I don't think you want to, and I know I want to learn some language other than Hunger Games victor. My point is, whatever you're going to do, get around to doing it, because all of us tend to forget that time keeps going on. Hell, even old Mags probably still felt like she was a fourteen year old kid scrambling to live through every day. Stop scrambling." She nods. "And that's it. That's all I'm saying, because you aren't my business. You aren't Jo's business, either. Do you want to hike any further?"  
  
"No."  
  
"I want to go up to the top. Can you get down on your own?"  
  
I nod. "Is it safe for you to hike alone?"  
  
At this, she just laughs, which is fair. Stupid question between victors.  
  
She heads up the mountain, and I head down. I take a bus from the parking lot back to my neighborhood, and go back to my apartment. Aurrie is trying to make dinner when I get back, but I don't think he's likely to find work as a restauranteur. He's managed to master simple bread, and I praise him for it, but the meat is tough, the potatoes are burned, and he's forgotten anything resembling a vegetable. I pull out some carrots and peel them to eat raw with the meal.  
  
"How was your meeting?" he asks.  
  
"Meeting sounds really formal."  
  
"Date?"  
  
I laugh at this. "No. Family reunion, on the victor side."  
  
"Oh." He stabs at a blackened piece of potato. "What did she want?"  
  
I think about the bodies in the city morgue, then of the prison cell, and the way Snow put them up like grotesque knick-knacks. I open my mouth to tell my cousin, but I can't do it. I can't make the words come out. "She wanted to invite me to District Fourteen," I say lightly, but when I look up, Aurrie is staring at me, his eyes wary. "What?"  
  
He starts to say, "Nothing" -- I can see his mouth forming the words -- but instead, he steels himself and says, "You stared into space for close to five minutes before you answered. Did you know that?"  
  
"I…" I look at the clock. "No. I…"  
  
He looks down. "Sorry, Peeta. I just wasn't sure if you knew."  
  
"I didn't. And don't apologize. I wonder how often I do that."  
  
"I see you do it a lot," he says. "Where do you go?"  
  
I shake my head. "I don't want to -- look, can we not talk about it? It's weird."  
  
"Okay," Aurrie says with some level of relief. "Sure. But you know… maybe you could… I don't know. Never mind." He smiles nervously. "How's the painting? Did you ever get that… abstract thing?"  
  
"Nah. How'd the nuke paper go?"  
  
"I got an A." His smile turns real. "My teacher says I should write like that more. He even thinks I could go to college." He rolls his eyes at what he obviously thinks is an absurdity.  
  
We talk for a little while about school and painting, and how things are at the bakery. He has a temporary second job mopping floors at a bar now, and he goes to it just as the sun sets.  
  
I try to call Katniss, not really expecting anything, and don't get anything. I don't bother trying to call Haymitch. Delly is out there too now, but she doesn't have a telephone. I go back to my room and try to paint, but I can't think of anything I want to put on the canvas. I see Mom's hand in its little vat. Dad's jaw. Ed's foot. I see Jona and Sarey and the baby, and I hear Snow telling me not to lie to him, or Betany would be there with me permanently.  
  
_You thought she was Katniss's baby. The one you made up. Your baby, dead in formaldehyde._  
  
I shudder. Maybe I did think that. I don't remember everything that went through my head, and I don't want to.  
  
But I do.  
  
I stay in my studio until it's dark, then stumble through the dark apartment to my bedroom. I lie awake for a long time, and I barely notice when I do sleep, but once, during the night, I look across the room and I see Betany in her coffin. Jona, burned and dead, but still moving around, is holding Dad's jawbone. Sarey is somehow or another Mom. They don't speak to me. They're huddled together, speaking to each other. I can hear them, but I can't understand them. Downstairs, the door opens and Aurrie comes in, knocking over the coat tree and making a racket. I blink myself awake, and they're gone.  
  
The next morning, I call Annona at the bakery and tell her that I don't feel well. She says she can function without me. I promise that I'll try to be in tomorrow.  
  
I pick up the telephone and call Dr. Aurelius.

  
  
**_March 20, 637 After Founding (Year 0 Panem Republic). Psychiatric transcription by Gavin Aurelius, subject Mellark. Private notes._** _  
[subject enters, agitated, five minutes before the start of the emergency session he called for]  
P: They were in there with me.  
A: Who do you mean?  
P: My family. They were there with me. Not in spirit. Not in some metaphor way. Snow brought whatever pieces of them he could find. Mom's hand. She was… pointing at me. I had to guess whether it was Ed's foot or Dad's. It was Ed's. Ed's foot. Dad's jaw. Betany died of smoke inhalation. Sarey, too. Jona lived the longest, even though he had burns. He was trying to shelter them, but he must have watched them die. But his lungs were biggest. He breathed longer. And he hurt. The burns. I know what he felt like.   
A: Peeta, go back to the beginning.  
P: No. It wasn't the beginning. It was when I defied him. He brought them in. The pieces of them. My niece was almost whole. He said if I lied to him, he'd leave her in there all the time, like he did with Mom's hand. And when I told Thirteen about the bombers, he went through with it. My parents. My brothers and Sarey. My niece. All of them. And he kept showing Katniss and the bombing and they were right there. He was trying to say that it was her fault. That she killed them.  
A: And are you still angry at her?  
P: Yes! No. I don't know. We had to have the war, didn't we? My father believed in it. Snow didn't even have a file on him, you know. But Beetee says he was there all along. He helped with messages. Snow never found out.  
A: Your father was with the rebellion.  
P: Even I never found out until Beetee told me. I should have known. Why didn't Haymitch tell me?  
A: You'd have to ask him. [Pause] Peeta, are you still angry at Katniss?  
P: [thinks for a long time] No.  
A: You don't sound sure.  
P: No, I _ am _sure. I just forgot what sure feels like. I am sure. That wasn't Katniss. That was Snow. Katniss did what she had to. We all did. Because of what Snow did. It wasn't her fault at all._

  
  
When I get back from Aurelius's office, I make one more call.  
  
It rings several times.  
  
Then my grandfather picks up.  
  
I'm shaking when he arrives. It's the worst shaking I've had since Katniss was leading us through the tunnels. I don't know what I look like, but it must be bad, because Justinian guides me to the car like I'm the old man and he's the seventeen-year-old. He secures me in the passenger side, then comes around to drive. I notice with no great surprise that he has to hotwire it, but I don't mention it.  
  
"What is it?" he asks as soon as he gets the heat going. He's got it cranked up high, but I don't feel it.  I'm freezing.  
  
"I just need help with something. I…"  
  
"Peeta, be straight with me."  
  
"Just… we need to go to the morgue. Will you come with me? I need… my family."  
  
The bodies are there to be claimed, but my hands are shaking so badly that Justinian has to guide me through it. He looks at Mom's hand for a long time, all of his usual good humor gone, and he's the one who demands all of the paperwork, everything about what was done and how the bodies came to be here. I have to sign the forms. Our genetic match is solid, but he has no legal connection to my family.  
  
He sits beside me while the forms pile up on the table, and tells off several bureaucrats who look impatient while I try to make the pen hit the line I'm supposed to sign on.  
  
After, he takes me to his little one-room apartment (dropping off the car at a nearby garage with a thank you note and some money for fuel) and gives me hot chocolate that I think is laced with something calming, because the shaking finally comes to a stop.  
  
"I read the reports," he says. "The bastards."  
  
"Thanks for… you know. Coming along."  
  
"I'm glad you thought to call me."  
  
"She was… and my brothers…"  
  
He nods, following my train of thought well enough. Mom was his daughter, even if he didn't know her. My brothers were his grandchildren as much as I am. Betany was his great-granddaughter. There are duties, and I guess they fell on both of us.  
  
I stay for a little while, then he calls Effie. She comes in a taxi and bundles me into it. I ask if I can just go back to my place. She tells me that she'll only do that if she can stay with me until she's sure I'm all right. I tell her that would be fine. She stays for two days before we talk, taking the first personal days I've heard of her taking since she started working for President Paylor.   
  
I finally cry like a normal human being who lost his family, and she holds onto me and rocks me, and comforts me in the way I wish I could believe my mother would have. There's nothing I especially remember about those two days, or about the final, cleansing tears. It's not a blur. It's just healing time, when nothing much happens. Times like that are always a little strange.  
  
When the tears end, I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face, then I offer to make dinner for Effie and Aurrie (Justinian is off on another errand). It's a quiet meal, but it's good, and we enjoy one another's company. Aurrie asks after Tazzy, who is doing well. Effie hints that they should get back together, but Aurrie seems to have come around to Tazzy's point of view -- they were friends as kids, and he hopes they will be friends again, but they know too much for anything else. Effie rolls her eyes at this.  
  
She asks if I'll try to call Haymitch, and I do. I get him, too. He's very obviously drunk. Effie grinds her teeth and doesn't ask to take the phone.   
  
The next day, I go to my regular appointment with Aurelius. We talk honestly about my family, about the cell, about District Twelve. At the end of it, he tells me that, if I want to, I can go back.  
  
"You're not obliged," he says. "You can stay here. You can go anywhere you like."  
  
"Have you been talking to Enobaria?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Never mind."  
  
"I want you to do me a favor. Now that you're free to go, stay. For a week. Then come back next week and tell me what you decide."  
  
I'm willing to go along with it. Having the option of going back does change things. I talk to Annona at the bakery about it. I talk to Aurrie and Justinian. I spend time with Effie. I take Wenna out for coffee before class.  
  
We walk together into the studio, and take our places at the easels. Pacuvius gives a brief talk on the Clarity movement in early Capitol abstract art. It had a vast influence on classical Capitol architecture. The traditional painting method was using a plastic based paint on a dissolvable canvas, so that when it dried and set, you'd end up with something that looked like a stained glass window, except without the mosaic quality. He urges us to think in terms of that movement as we worked in our color fields, though without the right equipment, it is only a source of inspiration.  
  
I pick up a paintbrush and dip it into the clearest green I can find. I'm not sure why. My thought at the beginning is to try and find a way to paint my feelings about what I've learned, my sense of my family's deaths.  
  
Instead, I make a quick series of deep green swirls across the middle of the canvas. Then a blotch of dark gray. A series of sparkling yellow…  
  
I stop.  
  
"I see you're still in figures," Pacuvius says.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"It's a cave."  
  
I nod.  
  
Pacuvius looks at me for a while, then seems to remember something. "Go on," he says. "Paint."  
  
It isn't a good painting. It's the kind of slapdash thing you can do in a three hour class. It's not strictly figurative -- or, more precisely, it's not illustration. I see the figures clearly enough. They emerge in silver and faded blue around the edges of the canvas. My mother's hands at the top, curled into claws. My father's mouth in the lower corner, smiling wryly. The rest of his face is faded and generalized. Ed's feet, running, though he wasn't a runner. Jona and his family up the right side, in quick strokes.  
  
But the center isn't about them. The center is a boy in the cave, his hair a quick series of yellow strokes. He is lying supine on the ground in the center of the circle. The cave doesn't exactly have a floor. The sketched, ghostly figures on the side are bent around the scene, but they don't have its reality, not anymore.  
  
I stop painting and step back. It's bad on a technical level, and the symbolic level is worse: From a distance, I see that I've drawn myself at the center of a single gray eye.  
  
Wenna looks over and sees it. She gives me a sad sort of smile.  
  
I go home.  
  
I spend the next several days sketching Katniss. I haven't drawn her since the end of the war, but my fingers remember how each line of her face is drawn. They used to make this drawing over and over. But she is the one thing I _haven't_ tried. I've thought of her in a vague way. I've talked about her a little bit. But this has been on hold. Now, it starts flooding back to me. The arenas. The nightmares. The kiss when we came up from the sewers, when she begged me to stay with her. I feel like I've climbed over a prison wall, and found her at last, in the place where she has always been: At the end of my road.  
  
At home.  
  
Behind the bakery.  
  
The smells come back now. Baking bread, cinnamon rolls, a hard winter rain. I feel my mother beside me, hear her sharp voice. There are customers outside, and I know they can hear her screaming at me. They always can. No one ever does anything about it. It's District Twelve, and we stay out of one another's business and then Ed comes in and tells her that there is someone rooting around in the trash bins and she's screaming again, and I look out at the customers and their blank, disinterested faces. I am invisible. She's invisible.  
  
I am not surprised when I look out the window and see that the girl in the rain is Katniss Everdeen. I've known it, I think, since Mom started screaming. There is something inevitable about it.  
  
I tell myself briefly that it's an accident when I first let the loaves of harvest bread teeter, but I realize that no one sees it. I hear Mom screeching, then muttering as she comes in, talking about greedy Seam brats and "Danny's little bitch" (her name for Mrs. Everdeen in most cases). I don't think there's anyone else who can hear her when she says, "World's better off without that one," and that's when I flip the bread board. There is nothing accidental about it, though I manufacture a look that I hope says, "Oops, clumsy." I know she'll hit me for it, and she does.   
  
But Mom knows what I did. And she knows why I did it. That's why she orders me to feed it to the pigs. She knows Katniss is there, and she knows Katniss will see good food going to the pigs -- thrown by me -- while she sits in the rain and starves.  
  
I go as far as feeding the first bit. Mom would watch, I'm sure, but it's busy inside. She has to mind the shop. She'll only be checking out the window. As long as I don't look like I'm doing anything, I can do what I meant to do. I keep my movements even, and I carefully toss the bread without turning my head. I hear the little splash.  
  
A minute later, Katniss runs past, but she turns around and looks at me. She sees me. She knows. She sees me again in school. I catch her staring at the bruise on my face.  
  
I draw her in the rain. I draw her at school. I draw her bending over a dandelion, then looking at me over the top of it.  
  
_Seeing_ me.  
  
Seeing _me_.  
  
By the time I return to Dr. Aurelius's office, I know what I'm doing. He expected as much.  
  
I pack. I make arrangements to finish my art classes remotely. I sell Aurrie the apartment for a handful of change that he has in his pocket, and we both sign the paperwork, though he seems embarrassed about it. I threaten to pay his college tuition in full if he doesn't accept the apartment. I don't promise not to try doing that anyway. I have more money than I can possibly spend in District Twelve.  
  
Effie makes care packages for Haymitch and Katniss, and takes me shopping for proper winter clothes in Twelve (it's possible that my old clothes are there, but given Snow's ransacking of Victor's Village, it's not a sure thing). I introduce Wenna to Aurrie, hoping they'll hit it off, but they're just polite and cordial with each other. I make some last minute recipe trades with Annona and thank her for letting me help out.  
  
It all moves very quickly, and even as I board the train, it doesn't seem real. None of the re-settlers is familiar to me, though they all know who I am. There are a few people from other districts moving out to Twelve as well, for the adventure of re-building from scratch. I spend part of the trip playing poker with a girl from Eleven, and part of it helping an orphaned Seam boy remember what the square looked like.  
  
When we get in, I let everyone else depart ahead of me.  
  
They're going to a new bunch of shanties that's standing where I think the square used to be. It looks like the rebel camp in the Capitol, except that people are armed with hammers and saws instead of guns.  
  
My business isn't in the settlers' camp.  
  
The fence is gone, so I can go in anywhere. I follow the tracks along the old path of it, in the direction of Victors' Village. On the far side of the tracks, where I never went, I see the woods, as lush and green as ever. It's early spring, and the flowers are coming up. There's a patch of groundcover in a hollow where it looks almost like the plants have been deliberately set into a pattern, like a bird spreading its wings, but that's probably my imagination.  
  
I am almost to the place where the tracks curve away toward District Thirteen -- I wonder if they've rebuilt the route yet -- when I spot the patch of delicate yellow flowers. They run wild here, and always have.  
  
Primroses.  
  
I stop short. I haven't given much thought to Prim. I should, but we didn't know each other well. She was good, kind, smart. She helped me in District Thirteen, even after what I did to Katniss. I should have seen her better. I should have remembered her before now.  
  
I get down on the ground, and carefully dig around the roots, bringing the plants up gently.  
  
No one will be forgotten.  
  
I carry them on to Victors' Village, now easily visible with so much of the town and forest burned around it. I go through the gate, along the green. A few settlers are out as I make my way to Katniss's house. It's still and silent, and my first guess is that no one is home.  
  
I start to plant the primroses.

  
  
**_April 2, 637 After Founding (Year 0 Panem Republic). Psychiatric transcription by Gavin Aurelius, subject Mellark. Interview by telephone. Private notes._** _  
A: Your trip was safe?  
P: It was just a train ride. I found some primroses by the tracks. I brought them to Katniss.  
A: How is she?  
P: Hard to explain. But I think she's going to come back. I think she was waiting for me. And before you start, I know I can't be a crutch. But I like helping her. When I realized that she was waiting for me, I realized… so was I.  
A: You were waiting for her?  
P: No. I was waiting for me. And there I was.  
A: You're not sorry to have left the Capitol?  
P: No. I can get what I need from the Capitol. We're free to move around now. It's not like I can't go back if I want to do a gallery show or visit Effie or my cousin. Or Haymitch, when I can get him to come to his senses and go back.  
A: You're working on Haymitch?  
P: Haymitch is waiting for himself, too, I think. Oh, I told Katniss that she needs to call you for her sessions. I'll make sure she does it, but give her a few days. She just woke up.  
A: Woke up?  
P: She'll explain.  
A: [pause] So, are you settled in?  
P: Settled in may take a while. But I'm back._

**The End**


End file.
